The Guattari

Reader
Pierre-Felix Guattari
Edited by
Gary Genosko
Copyright e Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1996
First published 1996
2468 109 753 1
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British Library CaUlloguing in Publication Datil
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British l.Jbrary.
Library of Congress CaudDging-in-Publication Data
Guattari, Felix.
[Selections. English. 1996]
A Guattari reader I Pierre-Felix Guattari; edited by Gary Genosko.
p. em. - (Blackwell readers)
ISBN 0-631-19707-9. - ISBN 0-631-19708-7
1. Criticism - History - 20 century. 2. Criticism - Psychological aspects. 3. Psychoanalysis
and literature. I. Genosko, Gary. II. Title. m. Series.
PN94.G83 1996
194 - dc20
Typeset in 10 on 12pt Plantin
by Pure Tech India Limited, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain by HannoHs Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall
This book is printed on acid-free paper
95-42828
CIP
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: The Vicissitudes of Therapy
1 The Divided Laing
2 Franco Basaglia: Guerrilla Psychiatrist
3 Mary Barnes's "Trip"
4 The Four Truths of Psychiatry"
5 The Transference
6 Psychoanalysis Should Get a Grip on Life
Part II: From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
7 The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis (With Gilles
vii
37
42
46
55
61
69
Deleuze) 77
8 Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 95
9 The Postmodern Impasse 109
10 Postmodemism and Ethical Abdication 114
Part III: A Discursive Interlude
11 Institutional Practice and Politics
Part IV: Polysemiosis
12 Semiological Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement
13 The Place of the Signifier in the Institution
14 Ritornellos and Existential Affects
15 Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire
Part V: QueerlSubjectivities
16 Three Billion Perverts on the Stand
121
141
148
158
172
185
VI Contents
17 Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse
18 A Liberation of Desire
19 Toward a New Perspective on Identity
20 Genet Regained
Part VI: Red and Green Micropolidcal Ecologies
21 Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes
(With Eric Alliez)
22 Communist Propositions (With Antonio Negri)
23 The Left as Processual Passion
24 Remaking Social Practices
A Select Bibliography of Works by Guattari
Index
193
204
215
218
233
248
259
262
273
277
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to the advice and service so generously offered by the
following people: Brian Massumi, Jean-Franc;ois C6te, Peter Van Wyck,
John O'Neill, and Nicholas Zurbrugg. Paul Bouissac, Jacques Pain, Mike
Gane, Michael Hardt, Judith Squires, Tim Murphy, and Charles Stivale
pointed me in the right directions. Special notice needs to be given to the
translators who worked with me on this project: Sophie Thomas, John
Caruana, Lang Baker, Charles Dudas, Peter Trnka, Ben Freedman,
Todd Dufresne, and Fadi Abou-Rihan. Samir Gandesha and Amresh
Sinha provided moral support. In addition, many people facilitated the
permissions process in the UK, France, and the US. Rachel Ariss pro-
vided warm support and incisive comments, and our daughter Hannah
kept me on schedule.
This project was conceived during a very convivial lunch with my
editor Simon Prosser in a cafe in New Cross near Goldsmiths' College in
London where I was a Visiting Research Fellow in Sociology in 1993-94.
Special thanks to Chris Jenks for his invitation, and to Les Back for his
encouragement.
For-permission to reprint and/or translate material, the author and the
publisher are grateful to the following:
"The Divided Laing" ["Laing divise", QL 132 (1972)], "Franco Basa-
glia: Guerrilla Psychiatrist" ["La contestation psychiatrique", QL 94
(1970)], "The Postmodem Impasse" ["L'impasse post-modeme", QL
456 (1986)] and "The Left as Processual Passion" ["La Gauche comme
passion processuelle", QL 422 (194)] are all used with the kind per-
mission of La Quinzaine litteraire.
"Mary Barnes' 'Trip' " ["Le voyage de Mary Barnes", copyright Le
Nouvel Observateur (28 mai 1973)]. Used with the kind permission of the
publisher.
"The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis", reprinted from G. Deleuze
and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. by H. Lane, M. Seem, R. Hurley,
translation copyright 1977 by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin
Books USA Inc. Used with the kind permission of the publisher.
Introduction
En bref, toujours et plus que jamais: la revolution moleculaire. [In
short, always and more than ever: the molecular revolution.]
Felix Guattari, 'La revolution moleculaire', Le Monde (7 dec.
1990): 2.
All Readers tell the story of their editors' reading and The Guattari Reader
is no exception. The articles and interviews in this volume are assembled
around five themes: "The Vicissitudes of Therapy", "From Schizo By-
passes to Postmodem Impasses"; "Discursive Interlude" [a long inter-
view on a variety of topics]; "Polysemiosis"; "QueerISubjectivities", and
"Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies" In other words, this Reader
addresses the issues of anti-psychiatry and anti-psychoanalysis; the schizo
process and the promise of a post-media era set against the dead end of
postmodem theory; a wild and woolly polysemiotics based on creative
extrapolations from the glossematics of Louis Hjelmslev and the semi-
otics of C.S. Peirce; the queering - that is, the polyphonic potentializa-
tion - of subjectivity; a theory of capitalism and how, and why, to resist
it. These do not by any means cover the entire field of Guattari's work,
nor are the individual pieces meant to neatly tie up the five arrangements.
None of the arrangements are solid blocks; they are all porous, internally
diverse, and crossed by multiple thematics.
We are on the verge of a long-delayed and for some, long-awaited,
explosion of interest in and publishing - in English, at least - on Guattari
as his work emerges from the shadow of Gilles Deleuze The Guattan
Reader will fmd itself in good company. Still, how many of you have been
to a Deleuze and Guattari conference and not heard more than a few
words on Guattari? Too many? Yet I have not attempted to separate
Guattari from.> his co-authors. Such an attempt would be completely
wrongheaded in Guattari's own terms. Still, I am sorely tempted
merely as a provocation - to frame the problem sociologically in terms of
a generational (perhaps even a departmental) divide among readers, but
this, too, would distort the important lessons Deleuze and Guattari have
taught about the conjunction - among others - between their names. I
have included Guattari and Deleuze and Alliez and Negri ... because it
2 Introduction
was not by accident that they all ended up writing together and between
one another.
I will not enter here into a detailed justification of my selections. There
is too much to say about them, none of which could satisfy all of the
possible objections to them. Which is not to say that I'm not inviting
second guesses. I did, however, want to avoid an imbalance between
material already available in English and previously untranslated material
(the situation is always, in this regard, fluid; a few retranslations of
material are included), as well as using both short and long pieces, and
have included journalistic articles as punctuation for the longer technical
bits. I also wanted to make use of as many statements of position as
muddy explorations (although, personally, I enjoy wading through the
latter).
Instead, in this introduction I want to provide some background and
critical material drawn from a variety of sources which support the
themes that run through this Reader, without, I hope strangling any of the
sections, and choking out the reader's own de-and reterritorializations.
The first two introductory essays situate Guattari in terms of significant
events, places, and debates in the European anti-psychiatry movement.
The key concept under discussion is the 'sector', and the key site is La
Borde clinic. The third section is organized around the concept of the
therapeutic bestiary, and uses the 'animal' as a device for revealing
tendencies in Freudian analysis against which Guattari theorized and
also inherited and adapted to his own needs. Guattari, too, has a bestiary.
The goal of the section on schizoanalysis is to explicate elements central
to Guattari's "pragmatics of the unconscious" and provide an example of
how a difficult concept such as the machine may be put to work on a text
from pop culture. The final introductory section is devoted to Guattari's
theory of Integrated World Capitalism and the emergence of his alterna-
tive brands of communistic and ecosophical thinking. The introduction
ends by taking note of some of the particular political projects in which
Guattari was involved before his death on August 29, 1992. Choose,
then, as you like, and make connections as your reading progresses; treat
this Reader like a rhizome. Or make a diagram. There is no need to match
the following introductory sections to particular arrangements of mater-
ial. This is supposed to be a user-friendly collection rather than a stodgy
manual!
1 And-Psychiatry and ~ Sector
Throughout its various manifestations in literature, media, and even
cinema, the anti-psychiatry movement of the early 1970s discovered the
Introduction 3
close relationship between psychiatric and other forms of repression. In
Guattari's view this decisive discovery led to a variety of developments in
different European countries, some examples of which are reviewed in
his essay, cobbled together from previously published short articles,
"Alternative Ii la psychiatrie". 1 For example, Le Reseau was established
in Brussels in 1975. The Belgian project centered on developing an
"alternative to the sector", and many radical psychiatrists from France,
Italy, and elsewhere contributed to a colloquium held in January of that
year. This colloquium blossomed into the European Network for Alter-
natives to Psychiatry. The phenomenon of sectorisation refers to psychia-
tric facilities outside hospitals (including day hospitals, dispensaries,
home visits, drug rehab programs, etc.) which, in France, are divided
into sectors or districts serving the mental health needs of as many as
60-70,000 people.
2
The sector, let us say, brought psychiatry to the
"community" The figure of 70,000 (mentioned by Guattari, among
many others) acquired a life of its own and a relevance far beyond its
initial importance. This was considered to be the smallest district and
thus was not, in relation to super-sectors of over 200,000 inhabitants,
normative. But unfortunately it became so. The rigid formula of three
beds per thousand, based on the ideal figure of 70,000 people per sector,
very quickly bore no relation to the reality for many doctors in the
fast-growing surburban satellite cities around Paris.
The question of the sector had an enormous impact on French, and
European, mainstream and radical psychiatry. For what was at issue was
nothing less than whether the hors l'hiipital could succeed in something
other than reproducing the psychiatry dans /'hOpital. Sectorisation became
the official doctrine of the French Ministry of Health in 1960, the year
the famous Circulaire du 15 mars was issued by Ministere Aujaleu,
long-serving Directeur general de la sante (1956-64), a military doctor
and close ally of De Gaulle. A community mental health pilot project was
launched in the XIIIth arrondissement of Paris. It was only after the events
of May 1968 and in the early 1970s, that this experiment in sectorisation
became the model for actual changes in the delivery of a national mental
health care system. But the XIIIth, too, acquired a mythic dimension,
despite the questions raised about whether it was transposable to other
fully socialized sectors since it was, among other things, semi-private,
without a hospital infrastructure, or an asylum. It needs to be kept in
mind that sectorisation had a silent period from 1964 to 68 after Aujaleu
was replaced.
Initially, the "policy of the sector" was considered by many activists to
be socially progressive, given the need to reform the French asylum
system. But by the time the policy was put into place, it was considered
to be reactionary.' Members of Le Reseau with personal experience of
4 Introduction
this policy, and whose political views at first allowed them to cooperate
with it in good will, "came to realize", as Guattari put it, "that no
fundamental problem will be solved in this domain as long as we do not
have the goal of what they call a depsychiatrization of madness" 4 This
understanding of the condition of the psychiatrized is reached through
the recognition that psychiatric repression functions by other means in
the absence of hospitals: to use Guanari's imagery, a neuroleptic or
chemical straightjacket replaces a physical straightjacket. In developing
his perspective on "popular alternatives to psychiatry", Guattari emphas-
ized that mental illness was irreducible to social alienation and the
critique of capitalism. As Guattari explains, it is not so much a matter of
"politicizing madness" as of opening the eyes of traditional political
organizations to the hitherto misunderstood relationships between a
series of problems concerning the condition of the mentally ill, immi-
grants, women, children, etc. Indeed, Guattari's own practice aimed at
overcoming the reduction to social alienation, which denies and sup-
presses the specificity of madness, and evading the trap of familialism,
which in its turn denies, by excluding, extra-familial or social factors.
Although Guattari came to criticize the elitist and largely theoretical
aspects of what is called the second wave of anti-psychiatry - to which I
will return momentarily - for him it was still in many ways superior to the
first phase of the movement. In the first phase, doctors such as Thomas
Szasz maintained, in his influential The Myth of Mental Illness/ that
mental illness was a myth that needed to be debunked so that a non-
medical model of social dis-ease, existential and ethical problems of
living (interpersonal and moral conflicts), could emerge and provide for
a radical critique and renewed understanding of existing practices. Szasz
would later, in another myth book, this time The Myth of Psychotherapy,6
suggest that psychotherapy be renamed iatrologic, belonging to rhetoric
and logic, as an art of healing souls without medical, professional, and
institutional pretensions. His paradigm was hysteria - a diagnosis he
demythologized by using a game-conflict model to reveal that it was a
longstanding term of evasion referring to a condition arising from a
person's inability to forget old rules and relinquish playing old games,
often marked by the refusal to play any games at all. By the same token,
transference-neurosis arose from the projection of old goals on new
games; likewise, disappointment-reactions of varying degrees resulted
from the recognition that there were no transcendentally valid games.
Guattari would not, however, play Szasz's game of social alienation.
Despite his differences with Franco Basaglia, the Italian anti-psychia-
trist of the second wave, Guattari claimed that Basaglia's work chal-
lenged both anti-psychiatric elitism, marginality, and did not flirt with
the "convenient myth" hypothesis. In Guanari's review of Basaglia's
Introduction 5
L'institution en negation,1 he defends Basaglia's critical approach to the
ideas of British reformers such as Maxwell Jones and applauds his ability
to refuse the reformist politics of the sector. Basaglia's group Psichiatria
Democratica was a mental health employees' association and lobby
group whose task was to influence change in psychiatric practices and to
politically educate its members on matters such as refusing to become
"functionaries of consent", refusing to use "medical alibis", while admit-
ting the reality of psychiatric problems, learning to deal with psychopa-
thological problems related to conditions at work, at home, in the city, in
the university, etc.
The documentary mm Pow a dilier was created by the group at the
hospital in Parma gathered around Mario Tomasini (Marco Bellochio,
Sylvano Agnosti, Sandro Petraglia, Stefano Rulli). This film was, for
Guattari, "the illustration of the politics adopted by the mental health
workers in Italy united around Basaglia, Giovanni Jervis and the militants
of the movement Psichiatria Democratica".
8
In Pow a diiier, psychiatric
survivors face the camera and recount their experiences. But it is not only
a record of ordeals. Some of the most poignant stories, Guattari notes,
are those told by children who were "caught in the machinery of medico-
pedagogical sectorization"; the many women who relate the horrors of
their lives in the hospital retain their dignity and display resilience in
dealing with the daily challenges and fears of life outside the hospital. To
these examples are added the testimonies of labor activists who recount
their efforts at integrating so-called "profoundly mentally deficient" per-
sons into the workplace, transforming themselves, their new comrades,
and the atmosphere on the shop floor, in the process.
Guattari's praise for this film was high indeed. He wrote: "In my view
this film does not call for debate: it closes it. The time has come to close
the files, the files of the psychiatric hospital archaic or modernist
versions -, the files of sectorization, those of medico-pedagogical institu-
tions, those of psychoanalysis, etc. What is on the agenda is no longer
grand theoretical demonstrations, vehement denunciations and pro-
grams of all kinds, but genuine passages a l'acte (actings out)".9 What is
called for, then, is the genuine revelation ofhithero suppressed (and even
repressed) experiences and events in the psycho-pharmaceutical com-
plex, with political militantism focusing on everyday life and the transfor-
mation of public opinion, rather than on the creation of utopian
communities with few social effects. Forget guruism, Ie iacanism, psycho-
analytical silence, and all miniaturizations of repression, all shrinking.
But don't forget them altogether since the confessions of a star of
madness like Mary Barnes can reveal the inner-workings - pressures,
contradictions, absurdities, failures, successes - of English anti-psychia-
tric projects such as Kingsley Hall.
10
Men and women in documentary
6 Introduction
f1lms such as Fow a dilier do not always produce truths, Guattari admits,
even if, ultimately, everything concerning the psychiatric hospital must
be, with a view to both balance and urgency, brought into direct contact
with the "minimum good sense of people directly concerned" such as
those who found their voices in the film and those who watched it. Roger
Gentis, too, praised Fow a delier and the work of Psichiatria Democratica,
but wondered whether it was a difference in the political situation in Italy
that made this progressive change possible. To this question he answered
no: provincial communist administrations were not "naturally open and
receptive" to problems and solutions [pro]posed by anti-psychiatric ac-
tivists.
11
For his part, Guattari believed (circa 1970) that national condi-
tions needed to be taken into account since in Italy "the state of the
hospitals and the legislation is undoubtedly one of the most archaic in
Europe". 12 Circa 1989, Guattari would again tum to the Italian example,
this time pointing to the work of Franco Rotelli in the psychiatric hospital
in Trieste. Rotelli's group transformed the hospital into an international
cultural centre whose political goal was the transformation of traditional
psychiatry and other psychiatric hospitals in Italy.13
More recently, Guattari praised the revelatory aesthetic offilm-veriti in the
cause of making visible the interfaces between patient-doctor-institution in
Raymond Depardon's film Urgences.
14
The twenty-odd sequences in the
documentary, shot at the psychiatric service des urgences of the Hotel-Dieu in
Paris, powerfully reveal that "it is our own subjectivity which finds itself
encircled in this nightmarish carousel" of alcoholics, depressives, compul-
sives, etc. While film-veriti can access the "interiority of madness and
dereliction", Guattari emphasized that "the spectacle of all these existential
ruptures work directly upon our own lines of fragility". Depardon's film
brings the viewer into contact with a phenomenon to which one is close,
even if one is content to treat this proximity as a sufficient distance.
In terms of institutional politics, Guattari stated that the staff psychia-
trists in general "are totally deprived of the means of organizing a
humane reception worthy of the name" Whether or not there is a
demand for a humane reception is a question that they need to ask
themselves. Guattari was, however, unequivocal: a reception facility
must distinguish between new arrivals whose stays will be long and who
therefore may be admitted in a relaxed manner, and those new arrivals
who will have much shorter stays. Having made this distinction, how-
ever, Guattari maintained that with regard to the latter: "The expeditious
interviews dispensed one after another by the psychiatrists would not
even suffice in such cases, especially if the people who turned up are to
remain there for only a few Since this problem is well known to
specialists in institutional therapy, Guattari could ask: "Why, then, is it
there today in the heart of Paris?"
Introduction 7
If, on the one hand, English anti-psychiatry distinguished itself bril-
liantly on the theoretical level but held confused political goals, then, on
the other hand, in Germany the SPK (Sozialistiches Patientenkollectiv),
despite being burdened with an "ossified Hegelianism", created an "un-
ambiguous political cleavage" .16 For Guattari, the "affaire de Heidel-
berg" of 1971 marked "the first time psychiatric combat was taken to the
street, to the quarter, to the entire city. Like the 22nd of March at
Nanterre, the SPK was mobilized around a real struggle. ,,17
In the Polyclinic at the University of Heidelberg, a group of forty
patients and their doctor (Hubert) developed a critique of the institution
in which psychiatry was shown to function as an instrument of repres-
sion. The director of the clinic considered this group to be "a collective
of hate and aggression" Guattari remarks that what began as a "little
intra-hospital experiment became a mass struggle", largely in virtue of
the fact that as institutional opposition to the collective increased, so did
state resistance. Guattari relates that when administrative and legal
means failed to dissolve the group, a vote was taken behind closed doors
in the University Senate mandating a public show of force. Using an
unrelated event in suburban Heidelberg involving an exchange of gunfire
as an excuse, 300 riot cops, helicopters, and special brigades were
mobilized with the goal of crushing the SPK. Patients and doctors were
arrested, Dr. Huber's children were kidnapped, and many of the persons
arrested were drugged into submission in order to make it appear that
they were cooperating with the invading force. Dr. Huber and his wife
languished in prison for years on trumped-up charges that, first of all,
they themselves were insane, and second, that they were terrorists. No
end of legal irregularities and police dirty tricks surrounded the case. It
needs to be kept in mind that on several occasions in the 1970s Guattari,
too, was harassed by the French police who searched his apartment in
Paris and La Borde on the trail of, as they say, "suspected" militants and
"pornographic" publications. In Chapter 5, "QueerISubjectivities", the
first entry "Three Billion Perverts On The Stand" is the collection of
notes Guattari used in his legal defense against the charge of "affronting
public decency" brought about by the publication of an issue on homo-
sexuality of the journal he edited, Recherches.
Far beyond reformist politics of all sorts, the example of the SPK
posed for Guattari a new kind of practice in which the patients them-
selves, having repudiated reformism and the seductions of modern-
ization, established an inextricable link between political struggle and
mental illness, making madness the concern of everyone. And they did
this despite the reticence of the left to enter into new kinds of alliances
with groups that normally did not march through the streets, attend
meetings, and tow the party line. Guattari could thus state: "To put it in
8 Introduction
a somewhat excessive manner, the SPK is in a way the equivalent of the
Commune de Paris on the level of proletarian struggles,,}8 The Gennan
example also needs to be contrasted with Basaglia's experiments in
Gorizia. The latter ended, Guattari thinks, not by falling into theoretical
dogmatism, but by turning the "rightfully violent" negation of repressive
institutions into institutional change based upon social alienation rather
than on an understanding of the "unconscious signifying assemblage
[where] madness dwells, [and] which predetermines the structural field
in which political options, drives, and revolutionary inhibitions are de-
ployed, beside and beyond social and economic determinisms". 19
Turning briefly, then, [0 Spain circa 1975 and the activities of the Psy-
chiatrists Against Francoism of the Hospital ofConxo, in Saint-Jacques-de-
Compostelle, in Galicia, Guattari describes some effects of the process of
modernization (loss of beds, shrinking of the hospitalized popu'lation, dete-
rioration of the staff-patient ratio, the recruitment of young doctors - at first
for full-time positions but, later, in a standard union- and unity-busting
measure, reducing these to part-time). The hospital was, however, trans-
formed through the implementation of an open door policy, patient self-
detennination, meetings between staff and patients, and community
contact. These changes were met with a ''violent fascist reaction" in which,
ultimately, the government installed a new director and used the occasion of
the national strike of the MIR (Les Medecins Internes Residents) to gut the
staff and replace them with their own appointees.
This anti-psychiatric episode was inseparable, Guattari believed, from
the anti-fascist struggle in Galicia against the Franco government's non-
recognition of Galician cultural and political heritage and aspirations.
"Under these conditions", Guattari wrote, "it is impossible to envisage a
partial amelioration of the fate of the psychiatric inmates at the hospital
without gradually raising all the other problems of the emancipation of
the Galician people. ,,20 The issues raised by modernization point in
several directions in this case: the loss of traditional rural community
organizations dealing with the mentally ill, coupled with the will to
improve the conditions of the hospitalized, and give staff better salaries.
Guattari concludes that the lesson of the Galician response to modern-
ization is that the anti-psychiatric struggle must };lold onto the goal of
separating madness from its administration and evaluation by specialists
and groups of experts.
II La Borde
Before co-founding La Borde with Guattari, the psychiatrist Jean Oury
practised at the clinics of St. Alban (1947-49) and Saumery (1949-53).
Introduction 9
For him "Saumery represented a kind of concrete initiation period into
the technical and medical problems posed by psychopathology, but
equally an initiation into a collective life with all its misadventures". 21
Guauari, Oury recalls, visited him for long periods at Saumery. Saumery
was also Guattari's initiation into psychiatry. Oury convinced him to
abandon his study of pharmacy for a politically committed psychiatry. 22
While at St. Alban, Oury met Tosquelles, whose criticisms of
psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology, which he developed
during his wartime psychiatric work in Catalonia, would have a decisive
influence on St. Alban, and later, on La Borde.
Oury downplays any suggestion that a group at Saumery made a "bid
for power" by leaving the clinic in order to found La Borde. Rather, the
case was less dramatic. Saumery was a small clinic that had already
expanded from 12 to 50 beds. The absence of a psychiatric hospital in the
deparnnent of Loir-et-Cher presented the opportunity to build some-
thing original from the ground up.
Jean-Claude Pollack, co-author with Daniele Sabourin of La Borde ou
Ie droit a lafolie, for which Guattari wrote the introduction "La Borde, un
lieu-dit", remarks of the Lacanian beginnings of the clinic: "When I first
arrived at La Borde one didn't have the right to speak if one had not gone
over Lacan with ,a fine tooth comb. "23 Despite the fact that Guattari was
analyzed by Lacan and neither abandoned his seminar nor renounced
l'Ecole freudienne - well, except to the extent that he came to see
Lacan's brand of structuralized psychoanalysis as as religion devoted to
the cultivation and initiation of followers - the "duo of Oury-Guattari"
never required, we are told, the same degree of blind followership. Not
everyone shares this opinion. Lacan's breakway school had many connec-
tions with the GTPSI (Groupe de travail de psychotherapie institution-
nelle), founded at St. Alban in 1960, and a fixture at La Borde. Guattari
mentions in passing the "Caro affair" in his review of several books by R.
D. Laing in "Laing divise. ,,24 He keeps his distance from this affair by
using it as an example of the French public's sensitivity to the problems
of madness after the events of 1968, and as an instance of the need to
scrutinize every event which considers itself to be in some way exem-
plary, an operation which he does not perform. Guy Caro was the
medical director of the Clinique Burloud in Rennes. In September 1971,
he was fired from his post after initiating liberal reforms that had the
support of the community, the patients (primarily students) and staff.
Sherry Turkle implicates Guattari in the "Lacanian anti-psychiatric
clique" whose denigration of Caro's reforms, on the grounds that they
were under-theorized and insufficiently politicized, led to his firing. She
likens the weekend seminars at La Borde (Saturday at 6 p.m.) to Lacan's
Wednesday seminars in Paris as places for star-gazing. She quotes Robert
10 Introduction
Castel's sarcastic remarks to the effect that: "Poor Dr. Caro who is only
a progressive psychiatrist and a political militant from the provinces and
who had frequented neither Lacan's Wednesdays nor Cour-Cheverny
weekends. "25 Of course, for every bone Turkle has to pick with the
dynamic duo of Oury-Guattari and their followers, there is a positive
counterexample.
For his part, Oury was, according to Pollack, "often perceived [by
l'Ecole freudienne] as an irregular of a dangerous heterodoxy". Even so,
Pollack thinks that Oury's seminar at La Borde was "probably the most
often followed exegesis, and the most 'pedagogic' of the work on
Lacan."26 Guattari considered Pollack and Sabourin's book to be much
more than a work on La Borde: it was written from La Borde and belonged
there.
27
La Borde was a "black hole: the result of a semiotic collapse
which rises again, you don't know when! Sometimes fluxes of sign-par-
ticles are released, some of which settle in the form of texts, like this
One
n

28
It was the treatment of psychotics that set La Borde apart from most
public hospitals in France; it was also at first a private clinic, until La
securite sociale stepped in. Guanari and Oury wrote La Borde's constitu-
tion called "Constitution de l'An 1" the year the clinic opened in 1953.
While Guanari was there at the beginning, his involvement increased
after 1955. The myth of La Borde was propagated, Oury laments, not by
those who worked there, but by the intellectuals who for a time spent
their winter vacations there, at the place - a chateau, after all - that
became known as the "St. Trop de la Sologne!". For Oury, there were
too many people full of their own degrees visiting the hospital in order to
admire the spectacle of les Labordiens; worst of all, these intellectual
hordes were impossible to "civilize". 29 It seemed that one of the elemen-
tary accomplishments of the first wave of psychiatric reform - that
physicians speak to their patients - had been forgotten. The mythmaking
continues unabated, even by those who have worked there for decades,
like Marie Depusse: "the mad cried when Oury told them of Felix's
death, the following day in the great hall. 'Thank you for telling us in this
way,' they responded. In exchange, despite a great deal of wandering
during the night, for lack of sleep, they were polite, tender, making no
noise".30 It was the private status of La Borde, Oury laments, that helped
to propagate its mysteries and myths. While he regrets that it was not a
public institution, primarily for economic reasons (an opinion that Guat-
tari did not share), he also wants to discount the myth that its private
status gave the doctors the freedom to experiment in ways that would not
have been permitted in a hospital setting. JI The mythic dimension of St.
Alban is much the same. During the Second World War, with Paris
occupied, the director Lucien Bonnafe would provide "asylum" for the
Introduction 11
poet Paul Eluard in the fall of 1943; much has been written about this
episode.
32
Still, this much of the myth 1ple: the rescue of Tosquelles
from a French refugee camp, after the latter had fled the war in Spain,
and passed through the Pyrenees on foot. First Eluard, then, the Dadaist
Tzara, the "red psychiatrist" Tosquelles, the arrival of the new director
Bonnafe, refugees of all sorts, resistance fighters, a hiding place for many
doctors, all nestled away at a 1,000 metres altitude deep in Lozere.
33
In general, the politics of the sector turned the attention of psychia-
trists away from the hospital and its structures into the community. But
the community at issue was difficult to define, for it was not only
geographic and demographic in nature, but had juridical, economic,
theoretical, soCiological, and organizational features and consequences.
The extra-hospital focus of the sector served the interests of a variant of
anti-psychiatry as a gee-psychiatry of an active, peripetatic sectorial type.
As Bonnafe and Tosquelles explain, geo-psychiatrie is a "species of mi-
grant work", of the sort that was common at St. Alban with its outside
consultations, medico-pedagogical relations, and even its intra-hospital
therapeutic groups; that is, with its deterritorializations.
34
Psychiatry is
embedded in geography, Ie CTU. Local human geography is the milieu of
geo-psychiatrie. And to the extent that it may be called geophilosophical,
this psychiatry "affirms the power of a milieu" .35
As recently as June 1992, two months before his death, Guattari was
still referring to the lessons in human, particularly, workers' "under-
standing of human relations" in the film Fous a delier. Although the
"heroic epoque" of anti-psychiatry may have ended, Guattari did not
refer to such examples with cynicism, but in the context of his theoriza-
tion of the formation of new alliances between the worker's movement,
feminist and ecological movements. The formation of a "new progressive
axis" must, Guattari believed, be substituted for the old left-right split.
16
The thinkers of the second wave of anti-psychiatry - that infelicitous
label coined by David Cooper - have mostly passed away: Laing, Cooper,
Basaglia; Guattari and, most recently, Tosquelles. Gentis is still writing,
and Oury remains at La Borde. Szasz, from the first wave, soldiers on.
Developments in the delivery of mental health services during the 1980s
in France did not encourage Guattari. Although he did not predict the
privatization of psychiatry, he found a sort of "collusion between a
certain corporatism (psychiatrists, health care groups) and the cumber-
some state structures which administer French psychiatry" With little
room for social innovation and collective experimentation to provide
examples, Guattari witnessed a tendency towards a "generalized colour-
lessness".37 Even the most "lively and interesting" experiments of the
sector cannot correct the "institutional conditions that make life, social
life, impossible." For Guattari, "the true scandal is the existence of
12 Introduction
incarcerative structures which literally exterminate the mentally ill and
the personnel who work there, in the place of creating living systems.'138
In A Therapeutic Bestiary
Of the many sophisticated critical insights into psychoanalysis made by
Guattari in his own writings as well as in his collaborations with Deleuze,
the idea of becoming-animal presents a particularly rewarding way into
the concept of the assemblage and how one connects with it through
unnatural participation.
Does psychoanalysis have a zoological vision? In a brilliant essay writ-
ten with Deleuze, "1914: One Or Several Wolves?" in A Thousand
Plateaus, Guattari answers in the negative and shifts his loyalty behind
the Wolf-Man who, it is said, took revenge upon Freud in a letter to
Muriel Gardiner in 1945, by pointing out Herr Doktor's irreversible
blindness to animals.
39
Deleuze and Guattari fail to mention that the
letter in question was directed at Gardiner's daughter, whose interest in
animals the Wolf-Man wanted to encourage, perhaps even cultivate:
"Nothing. can be of greater value to a young person than a love of
nature and understanding of natural science, particularly of animals"
Deleuze and Guattari end their essay on this note, but omit the tail end
of the quote: "Animals played a large part in my childhood also. In my
case they were wolves. ,,40 Despite What Freud thought, I know a few
things about animals, the Wolf-Man seems to be saying. In "One Or
Several Wolves?" the Wolf-Man gets off the couch and runs with his
pack. The only kind of animals that psychoanalysis understands are
"individuated animals, family pets, sentimental, Oedpial animals each
with its own petty history, 'my' cat, 'my' dog.',41 Freud would not allow
his patient to become wolf, to join the pack with which he was already in
communication. In becoming-animal one neither imagines taking on the
features of a given creature nor actually becomes one. Instead, and thus
becoming is neither totemic nor biological (hence, unnatural), one con-
nects up with some elements of a wolf, or something closely related, to
compose a molecular wolf, perhaps even by bumping against your friends
as you run for together for the bus. Becoming is always molecular.
Assemblages are composed, and decomposed, and recomposed without
a molar unity informing them.
42
This is what Freud abandoned for the
sake of his fable of phobic animals, thus blinkering his zoological vision.
And such a vision for Deleuze and Guattari enables one to see that "every
animal is fundamentally a band, a pack" 43 Psychoanalysis couldn't see
that what was real was the becoming, because it always pointed else-
where.
Introduction 13
There are many reasons for this restricted field ofvision.
44
Until Anna's
dog entered the scene circa 1925, Freud had "little or no close contact
with animals. Indeed, the socio-semiotic significance of Anna's German
shepherd named Wolfi was never acknowledged by Freud; that is, it
came to be one of the many visible vehicles of the persecution ofJews and
a potent sign of National Socialism. Martha Freud knew better. The
status of dogs in the culture of the shell also pointed in the direction of
the brutish guard dog patrolling its borders. Strangely enough, Freud's
dogs would patrol his office. Freud's emotional investment in his dogs
overrode these cultural codes as well as his wife's annoyance at his habit
of feeding Wolfi and his succession of chows from the table.
45
Freud's
vision was further limited by his sociocultural milieu: horses, dogs, cats,
certain birds (pigeons), even the animals of the medical establishment,
would have been commonplace: Freud was familiar with animal halluci-
nations and a small selection of domesticates, pets and otherwise. Freud
may even have learned a few lessons about animals from the "sexual
research" carried out at the zoo at Schonbrunn on the outskirts of
Vienna by his young patient Little Hans. Most important, however, was
Freud's love of dogs. Elsewhere I have shown that the psychoanalytic
bestiary is rife with dogs.
46
Suffice to say that it is no mere rhetorical
taunt to say that every time Freud heard wolf he thought dog. The
"analyst's bow-wow" circulated around Freud's theory, practice, and
personal relations.
As far as large animals and male children arc concerned, phobic
animals, thought Freud, are substitutes for the father. Sandor Ferenczi's
young patient Little Arpad, as well as Little Hans, were trapped in
Freud's bestiary by the single apologue under which their becomings-
animal were subsumed. Chickens, horses, even wolves: it doesn't matter,
it's really daddy. There is more. As Deleuze and Guattari show, Freud
was quite incapable of seeing wolves. They were quickly transformed into
sheep dogs or goats. Moreover, Freud would not let the Wolf-Man look
into the riveting gazes of his dream wolves. He preferred the more
reassuring reversal that they were looked at as if they were unseeing
objects for our inspection, tortured zoo animals in a bad dream of the
domination of the wild. Freud didn't even admit that the Wolf-Man had
the same name as his daughter'S dog!
Deleuze and Guattari do not substitute something for Freud's sub-
stitution. Daddy is not replaced by a molecular assemblage. A molar
Daddy could de territorialize himself and take a place on the body-with-
out-organs of the pack. But he will take a different position with new and
varying interrelations with other changing elements every time he joins
an organ less body in composition. As Deleuze and Guattari specify,
multiplicity "was created precisely in order to escape the b s ~ r c t
14 Introduction
opposition between the multiple and the one . ,,47 In the history of
philosophy one finds many different kinds of multiplicities: some macro-,
some micro-. Opposition, interpenetration, overlapping, provocative ex-
tensions, mutually modifying disturbances: there is no dualism at work
here! Just "multiplicities of mulitiplicites forming a single assemblage,
operating in the same assemblage"48 in which we are caught up at one time
or another. Or so they say, despite the occasional slip back - which they
don't deny - into hierarchized abstract distinctions favoring the wild
multiplicity over the domesticated individual. Christopher L. Miller has
catalogued an impressive array of elements foreign to Deleuze and Guat-
tari's project; there are sanitizations for the sake of their rhizomorphic
and nomadic "happy talk", a few corpses stuffed into the footnotes, too
strong a claim of immunity from factual error, exoticism, uncritical
citations, stereotypes, elements of colonization (rhizome in its botanical
sense).49
If Freud tried to reduce the Wolf-Man's pack to his father, and De-
leuze and Guattari, in spite of themselves, privilege the wild pack-multi-
plicity, we should' pay special attention to those packs trained to hunt
together (wolfhounds), not so much to level the dualism, but to provide
an occasion for the combination of wild and domesticated packs. The
Wolf-Man, it needs to be recognized, had a long standing interest in
wolves because of his experiences on his father's estate in White Russia.
This was wolf country. Wolf-hunts were commonplace. 50 This memory
is both evidence of the Wolf-Man's experience of the pack, and Freud's
lack of interest in his patient's origins, but also an instance of the meeting
of wild and domesticated packs (wolfhounds preparing for the wolf
hunt), Sheep dogs, it might be mentioned, often have to fight off wolves
when flock-and pack-multiplicities collide. In addition, Deleuze and
Guattari set up a straw-dog as a sign of all of Freud's canine bestiary (his
chows and pekinese, Anna's German Shepherd, Marie Bonaparte's
chows, Dorothy Burlingham's dogs, etc.), further debasing the domesti-
cated side of the dualism. Surely they would appreciate a mixed pack, a
loose assemblage of wolves banished from their packs, lone hunters and
solitary pairs becoming pack-like during the mating season, de-domesti-
cated "feral" dogs, lost bow-wows, wolves, diamond dogs, Kristevan
packs, and the rest.
Every therapeutics has its bestiary, These considerations on becoming-
animal make it abundantly clear that the psychoanalytic bestiary is one of
the critical objects of schizo analysis. Schizoanalysis does not simply
throw open the cages of the psychoanalytic zoo! The thematic of the
bestiary is a way into the schizo analytic project. Consider a classic like
Guattari's essay "Transversalite" Transversality does nothing less than
schizophrenize the transference. The transference is the libidinal tie
Introduction 15
between the analyst and the analysand that is subject to analysis. At first
Freud thought it could be enlisted as a therapeutic ally, but later realized
it could be a form of resistance, a powerfully seductive, even dangerous,
bond. The transference, then, must be dismantled piece by piece and
completely resolved in order for an analysis to be considered successful.
With Guattari, the transference becomes vehicular, it gets away from the
analyst and analysand into group relations. Transference is no longer a
dual relation; it is at least triangular, but that isn't saying much. The
analyst is no longer the mirror; rather, it's the group. This places the
group in the position of the analyst, thus making it an analyzer.
Transversality is the transference become vehicular. Even so, Guattari
specifies that among the power relations between the groups in a typical
psychiatric hospital- i.e., between nurses and patients and doctors - the
transference may be "fixed obligatory, predetermined, 'territor-
ialized' on a role, a certain stereotype,,51 For Guattari, this is "a form of
the interiorization of bourgeois repression by the repetitive, archaic and
artificial resurgence of the phenomena of caste, with their procession of
fascinating and reactionary group phantasms". 52 Just as the transference
is the cornerstone of psychoanalysis, transversality in the group - rather
than the more ambiguous institutional transference, Guattari notes - is
the object of institutional analysis. And institutional analysis eventually
becomes, under the pressure to avoid its normalizations and profession-
alization as a therapy, schizoanalysis. Guattari writes: "Imagine a fenced
field in which there are horses wearing adjustable blinkers, and let's say
that the 'coefficient of transversality' will be precisely the adjustment of
the blinkers. If the horses are completely blind, a certain kind of trau-
matic encounter will be produced. As soon as the blinkers are opened,
one can imagine that they will move about in a more harmonious way.
Let's try to represent the manner in which people comport themselves in
relation to one .another from the affective point of view" ~ Guattari then
jumps from horses to porcupines: "According to Schopenhauer's famous
parable of the freezing porcupines, nobody can stand being too close to
one's fellows" Guattari slips back into the psychoanalytic bestiary,
echoing Freud's use of the same idea in his "Group Psychology" The
group is characterized, Freud says, by its libidinal ties. Both Guattari and
Freud quote Schopenhauer:
One cold winter's day, a company of porcupines huddled together
to protect themselves against the cold by means of one another's
warmth. But they were pricked by each other'S quills, and it was not
long before they drew apart again. The persistent cold drew them
back together, but once again they felt the painful pricks. They
alternately drew together and apart for some time until they
16 Introduction
discovered an acceptable distance at which they would be free of
both evils. 54
Presumably, the degree of blindness (the coefficient of transversality) of
the horses is related to the degree of blindness of the persons in the
hospital; or, Freud's blinkers, like those of the horses, need to be ad-
justed. Official adjustments by the trainer, or by the hospital bureau-
cracy, come from on high, while pressure from below, from the]lorses
and the patients, often have little effect in traditional settings. Tnlo-sver-
sality is opposed to and attempts to overcome vertical hierarchies and
horizontal intra-ward relations (the hospital is one fence, the ward an-
other) by maximizing (that is, bringing to light through analysis the latent
coefficients of transversality in the group, its desires) inter-level com-
munication, and enabling meanings to proliferate and pass between the
levels, the personnel, and the patients. There is a certain harmony in the
movement of the porcupines that illustrates the relations subsequent to
the removal of the horses' blinkers in Guattari's mixed bestiary. But the
degree of discomfort explodes the myth of group togetherness; the
achievement of balance is a sign of hope that the de-rationalization of the
group model, through reference to its instinctual, unconscious desires, is
conducive to the actualization and analysis of the hitherto repressed or
distorted desires of its members.
What should we say about these porcupines? Recall that the phrase "to
find one's porcupine" was a saying. that circulated in psychoanalytic
circles after Freud's visit to America in 1909.
55
The idea of seeing a
porcupine was for Freud "a lightning conductor" for drawing off
anxiousness about his main task of lecturing at Clark University. Freud
did, in fact, see a porcupine; he literally found one. Guattari finds his
porcupine in Schopenhauer, which really means he was able to let Freud
serve as a lighting conductor for his task of elaborating the concept of
transversality. The porcupine is just another animal in the psychoanalytic
bestiary which facilitates the siphoning of excess affect; after all, that is
precisely the role played by animals in children's animal phobias accord-
ing to Freud. Let psychoanalysis be struck by lightning, Guattari slyly
suggests.
IV Schizoanalysis
" 'Do it': this could be the watchword of a micropolitical schizoanalysis",
Guattari wrote in L'Inconscient machinique.
56
This is the sort of watch-
word that we need to watch out for: a yippie deterritorialization of money
at the stock exchange too easily reterritorialized by the new information
Introduction 17
technologies of late capitalism. But Guattari adds: "A schizo analytic
'watchword' will not attempt to interpret, to reorganize the significa-
tions, to compromise with them; it will postulate that beyond their
system of redundancy, it is always possible to transform the semiotic
assemblage which corresponds to them.,,57 Despite its compromises,
there's still hope for "do it". Schizoanalysis neither legitimates the signi-
fications of the dominant codes nor accepts the impositions resulting
from their overcoding. The schizoanalyst won't, in other words, open a
technical consultancy in pragmatics. Still, even schizo analysts have to
make a living at a social pragmatics aimed at detecting micropolitical
orientations, freeing them up, and making connections between them.
"Do it" means that the schizoanalyst is not sunk in a theoretical funk;
pragmatics is not held in third place, as it were, behind syntactics and
semantics. As Therese Grisham explains in linguistic terms: " 'Pragma-
tics' has historically designated all that is outside linguistic study. Using
a reterritorialized term in a subversive mode is typical of Deleuze and
Guattari, for they insist that pragmatics is immanent to a consideration
of language. The meaning of 'pragmatic' lies in its position in a power
relation, and not in representation or signification. To introduce a prag-
matics into language is to analyze language politically". 58 A further
example of this pragmaticization may be seen in Guattari's use of the
diagram.
In La Revolution moleculaire, Guattari attempted to recast Peirce's
inclusion of qiagrams under the rubric of icons by means of his own
distinction between signifying and a-signifying semiotics. For Peirce,
diagrammatic reasoning is iconic: "A Diagram is mainly an Icon, and an
icon of intelligible relations in the constitution of its Object" (CP
4.531).59 A diagram is, then, mainly but not exclusively an icon. It is, as
Guattari admits, for Peirce a "simplified image of things", repre-
sentational, and even "naturally analogous to the thing represented" (CP
4.368). Guattari first interrogates the relationship between the image and
the diagram: the image is both more and less than the diagram: an image
reproduces certain things a diagram does not, while a diagram captures
better than an image functional articulations.
6o
Guattari then situates
images in the category of symbolic semiotics, that is, among substitutes
for and representations of intensities and real multiplicites. Diagrammat-
ism is, Guattari thinks, a category of a-signifying semiotics; diagram ma-
tics is, however, another name for a-signifying semiotics, as is
post-signifying semiotics. Diagrammatics produces machinic rather than
significative redundancies. Guattari writes: "Peirce gives graphic repre-
sentations as examples of diagrams, temperature curves, for example or,
at the most complex level, algebraic equations. Signs function for and on
behalf of objects to which they refer, and they do so independently of the
18 Introduction
effects of significations which may e.xist laterally. It is as if machines of
diagrammatic signs had for an ideal the loss of all of their own inertia; it
is as if they renounced all the polysemy which can exist in symbolic
systems or signifying systems: the sign is refined, there are no longer
thirty-six possible interpretations but a denotation and an extremely
precise and strict syntax" .61
In Guattari's terminology, a-signifying signs are more deterritorialized
than those of symbolic and signifying semiotics. They blaze their own
trails across dominant significations without the authority of a signifying
semiology into which they can be translated and coded. While a Peirce an
could rightly claim that Guattari has engaged in acts of interpretive
violence by playing favorites with iconic phenomena, his approach to
Peirce is, I think, uncannily Peircean. To be sure, diagrams incorporate
certain habits involved in the creation of graphic abstractions (in geo-
metry and syllogistics); they also have the indexical feature of pointing
"There!" (CP 3.361) without, however, describing or providing any
insight into their objects. Since a diagram displays in itself the formal
features of its object, it may be said to take the place of its object: "the
distinction of the real and the copy disappears, and it is for the moment
a pure dream" (CP 3.362). This simulation defies, Guattari specifies, the
territorializing effects of representation and denotation. In Peirce's work,
too, diagrams can be deterritorializing because they are iconic - icons do
not lead one away from themselves to their objects, rather, they exhibit
their object's characteristics in themselves. Icons can be indifferent to the
demands of dominant s m i o t i ~ formalizations. Guattari adopts a Peir-
cean attitude towards Peirce by extending interpretation beyond his
conventional definitions. And this is what Peirce called critical-
philosophical thinking since it requires that one observe an author's line
of thought, from which one then extrapolates imaginatively. In his dis-
cussion of theorematic reasoning (CP 4.233), Peirce wrote: "It is necess-
ary that something be DONE" Guattari responds with "do it": an
a-signifying abstract machine is diagrammatic. So too is theorematic
reasoning. What was a necessary question for Peirce, was a question of
necessity for Guattari, a question understood well by Lenin and revisited
by Jerry Rubin.
Schizoanalysis will avoid the pitfalls of personological and develop-
mental psychologies, as well as all glottocentric semiotics, by establishing,
on a case to case basis, "a map of the unconscious" (including its strata,
lines of deterritorialization, black holes, blockages, etc.). Ever attentive
to the details of semiotic production, as well as to the "principle micro-
political lines of assemblages of enunciation and formations of power",
this cartographer will not, like a psychoanalyst, close and reduce, but
rather, open and produce. Such mapping opens onto experimentation.
Inrroduction 19
Disparate elements make connections and achieve various consistencies
of which there are different types (biological, ethical, etc); and all this
without being dependent upon or beholden to a super-stratum or struc-
ture. These consistencies are neither totalizing, nor imposed from the
outside. Connections are made along proliferating internal networks.
Keep in mind that such connective rhizomes are formed from truly
disparate elements, the partial objects of the unconscious.
A schizoanalytic pragmatics has at its disposal rhizomes that are irre-
ducible to linguistic signifiers and systems of representation. The distinc-
tion between the rhizome and the tree is not absolute. Guanari writes of
two preparations: first, "the preparation of a schizo analytic rhizome will
not have for its goal the description of a state of fact, the rebalancing of
intersubjective relations, or the exploration of the mysteries of an uncon-
scious lurking in the obscure nooks of memory". 62 This preparation
doesn't capture static unconscious arrangements; it doesn't decipher
what was already arranged, but remains open to experimentation in its
construction of intersecting semiotics. "Maps themselves are like labora-
tories where tracing experiments are made to interact". 63 Tracings are
"essential elements of diagrammatic semiotization", but they are, as one
finds in "Introduction: Rhizome", in A Thousand Plateaus, part of the
tree logic of reproduction, unless, of course, they are put back on the map
(which is not, incidentally, to deny or erase them).64 When writing with
Deleuze on this matter, Guattari seems more severe in separating trac-
ings (aligned with competence) from maps (related to performance). For
Guattari, however, maps of competence, for example, remain irreducible
to "competence" as such; in the same vein, there is no universal carto-
graphy of all the pragmatic maps. Guattari does note, however, that "it is
only with the signifying semiologies that a hierarachical relation of
double segmentarity installs itself between maps and tracings, fixing in a
narrow margin possibilities of semiotic innovation". 65 This is because
signifying semiologies are only relatively autonomous from the sort of
fonnalization which makes them dependent upon a system of universal
signification. Segmentation occurs in terms of a semiotic restriction of
the modes of connection - too many rigid dualist segments.
The second "preparation of a tree of the generative type will not be,
therefore, independent from that of a rhizome of the transformational
type".66 Before we examine in more detail these two kinds of schizo ana-
lysis, generative and transformational, take note that rhizomes can
branch out from the heart of generative trees. That is, idiolects and
vernaculars are particular performances for which no dominant language
or general competence may serve as a "totalizing reference" Many
readers of Anti-Oedpius, Guattari notes, made the mistake of making
Manichean principles out of the distinction between generative and
20 InlTOduction
transformational pragmatics. But "a schizoanalytic pragmatics of collec-
tive assemblages of enunciation will constantly oscillate between these
two types of micro-political semiotics". 67 Still, together they call into
question dominant encoding!;.
Anti-Oedpius required its authors to produce much secondary
commentary and correct misunderstandings, for example, the "bal-
ance sheet" on machines published in the second French edition.
68
"Do
it" with your own example. What about the deaf-dumb-and-blind-boy
and his pinball machine? Tommy may be read against the grain of the
nonnalizing motif of the "cure" Tommy's cure is a kind of psychical
nonnalization for his reinsertion into the institution of the family. The
first thing to be noticed is that Tommy is the story of a boy and his
machine: a "pinball wizard" The relationship between Tommy and
the pinball machine does not need to lead us into a game of identi-
fying correspondences between them; nor must we be led down the blind
alley of treating the machine as a kind of phantasy. What good is it to
point out, as almost every critic feels they must, that pinball is a meta-
phor for rock n' roll: it's the electric guitar. What makes such a displace-
ment and substitution necessary? Gadgets only pile up: pinball, electric
guitar
Anything, it seems, will do to reroute this kid's desire. This adds
nothing to the way Tommy communicates with the machine to the
amazement of the reiging "table king", whom he defeats. Tommy's
ability to connect with the machine is extraordinary because he cannot
connect with anything or anyone else, at least in a way that would
convince his parents and doctors, that his trauma is not narcissistic.
Haven't we heard enough about mirrors and psychology? His mother
neither tolerates the libidinal dynamism of his pinball playing nor his
fascination with his own reflection. Oh little blind and deaf narcissus,
listen to and look at your mommy! Over here little oedipus! When she
can't stand it anymore, she smashes the mirror, and Tommy becomes a
sensation: "Pinball Wizard in a miracle cure!" the papers read. It's the
beginning of his end.
The gesture of smashing the mirror is, however, bold, both as a
fabulous cure, and as a double anti-mirror stage. Strictly speaking,
Tommy is already too old for the child who, between six and eighteen
months, perceives and delights in hislber own mirror image, anticipating
and identifying with the bodily integrity it presents but slbe presently
lacks due to hislher physical immaturity. To the extent that the mirror
stage is fundamental to the constitution of the ego, even when it is
smashed it gives back to Tommy, perhaps even counterintuitively against
the expectations of fragmentation or cracking, a unity he apparently
lacked before then. But it wrecked his pinball game.
Introduction 21
The "table king" thinks Tommy is part of the machine: "He stands like
a statue! Becomes pan of the machine". He thinks Tommy looks like the
machine - "he's got crazy flipper fingers" - and represents him as one.
No wonder he has to give up the crown, he is no better than the doctor
at the research laboratory who tries to "cure" Tommy with several
ridiculous little noisemakers that he is supposed to cathect onto because
they makes sounds when struck. Only a shrink would believe in such
things! Indeed, Tommy - who is not bothered by pinball sounds - is
unimpressed. There is nothing more ridiculous than the doctor's claim
that "No machine can give the kind of stimulationlNeeded to remove his
inner block". On every occasion that Tommy plays pinball, affective
intensities pass between him and the machine, to and fro. Where is the
block? Let it be said that Tommy's libido withdraws into himself, except
when he is playing pinball. With this auto-erotism, his ego is his sole love
.object, it is worth repeating, with the exception of pinball. Here we find
his lines of escape. But Tommy and the pinball machine are completely
independent; they are not extensions or projections of one another. They
are becomings of one another. This is what allows these disparate ele-
ments to form a machinic assemblage on the basis of desire, to separate,
and reform. Tommy is "unblocked" at the table, any table, even that of
the local champ who has played them all "from Soho down to
Brighton" - and even if he is deaf, dumb and blind. The teenager-pinball
ensemble lets desire flow. The lights, buzzers, bells, and representational
iconography of the machine draw the table king into the ensemble, but
do not distract Tommy since, already deterritorializing on the sensory
level, "he plays by sense of smell". These "distractions" are also opera-
tional in relation to the reigning table king and his "Bally table", that is,
in relation to a second structure, a tilt machine, and, of course, to
followers of the game, groupies, hangers-on, capitalists, his abusive par-
ents, cousin and uncle, shrinks, and the rest.
Schizoanalysis doesn't play the pretend mirror games dear to psycho-
analysis. It "makes micro-political choices in opting, for example, for the
acceleration or the slackening of an internal mutation of assemblages, for
the facilitation or braking of an inter-assemblage transition . "69 It
distinguishes between intra-mutations and inter-passages, and then
makes decisions about them. Schizo analysis "will explore and will experi-
ment with an unconscious in actuality [en acte)" .70 Diachronic outcomes
and synchronic states will both figure in its questioning of the inclu-
sions, exclusions, confusions and refusions of assemblages. A generative
schizoanalytic pragmatics will concern itself with "a pre-existing assemb-
lage", while a transformational pragmatics will "create new [assemb-
lages),,71; they are distinguished, then, on the basis of their objects,
in a way Guattari considered to have been somewhat artificial but
22 Introduction
nonetheless prudent. Guattari adds: "Schizoanalysis isn't dependent
upon holding up or forcing events. It never loses sight of the com-
promises, the regressions, the progressions, the ruptures, the revolu-
tions exposing processes that it is not at all a question of pretending to
control, or of overcoming, but only of attending to semiotically and
machinically" . 72
In a generative schizo analysis, "the role of the components of passage
will be here limited to putting into play only weak interactions between
the assemblages, with the goal of loosening, untangling if possible, their
alienating mechanisms, their stratifications and their oppressive redun-
dancies, their black hole-effects, indeed, even of averting or deferring the
threats of catastrophe which hang over them" n Components of passage
connect the mutant fluxes of desire. This weak approach will not lead,
Guattari specifies, to a "systematic deterritorialization" of assemblages.
It is not passive, however, even though it "will accommodate. stases
of long-lasting reterritorialization", while it takes, at its own less than
frantic pace, whatever opportunities present themselves for deterritoria-
lizing and re-assembling. Its motto would be, Guattari adds, "no watch-
word, only passwords", as it "updates new machinic senses in situations
in which everything seemed played out in advance".74
A transformational pragmatics will involve itself in "the radical modifi-
cation of intrinsic mechanisms in the nuclei of assemblages and thus the
creation of new assemblages".75 The nuclei [noyaux] which specify as-
semblages exist at the points of crossing of two types of machinic consis-
tencies: molecular consistencies that are strongly resonant (across the
semantic and poetic fields) and interactive (among the components of
passage); these are "the actualized face of abstract machinisms" or the
formation of unformed matter; and intrinsically abstract consistency,
whose sign-particles may be manifested in different ways (as capitalist
abstractions) while also remaining "undecidable" and holding a
"possible potential" in reserve. 76 The machinic nucleus is where transfor-
mational schizoanalysis will work. The difference between generative and
transformational lies in, then, the shift from the putting into play of
"molar relations of subjection" to "molecular vectors of machinic subser-
vience".77 The strong interactions of the components of passage may be
distinguished on the basis of their points of departure: i) "assemblages
and inter-assemblage relations already constituted"; ii) "or of molecular
populations, of matters of expression, in a nascent state" Still, Guattari
immediately adds "it matters little, in effect, that these molecular popu-
lations and matters of expression are extracted from 'previous assemb-
lages' or are put together for the occasion!,,78 The critical issue here is the
implementation of micro-political choices which led to new assemblages;
this will involve an analysis of the transformations which elevate compo-
Introduction 23
nents "to the rank of components of passage", of which Guattari distin-
guishes three functions: i) discerniblization (borrowing magnification,
colorization and semiotic crossing from Proust, and acceleration, slowing
down, becoming heavy, and the deformation of spatio-temporal coordi-
nates from Kafka); ii) proliferation ("a component gets to work on its own
account and unfastens itself from the assemblage within which it was
stratified"); iii) diagrammatization ("a component unleashes a mutational
machinism capable of crossing heterogeneous domains from the point of
view of their matters of expression"). 79 All of the deterritorializations are,
Guattari specifies, controlled. In general, the two pragmatics Guattari
describes involve the extraction of existing components (generative) and
the creation ex nihilo of new components (transformational). And the
laner, Guattari writes, "harbours no particular mystery", because a car-
tographic diagram of its passages would reveal that iJ: does not stray far
from matter of expression, that is, to use Brian Massumi's language, not
far from a complex with neither substance nor form, but just "a bundle
of potential [non-actualized] functions". 80
Schizoanalysis is not a science, a technique, a type of cure, or a new
analytic practice. It is "inseparable from a personal trajectory in specific
social, political and cultural domains".81 This means that Massumi's
schizo analysis (with its references to: baby, marriage, high school, and
the rest) will differ from Eugene Holland's schizoanalysis, because in
both cases their trajectories will have been determined by their specifics:
experiences, contexts, and socio-political circumstances, etc.
82
Freud
thought the same of psychoanalysis, even though the degree of follower-
ship he would come to require from his colleagues defied his initial
recognition of methodological plurality.
Machinism is at once threatening and potentially liberatory; the former
due to "the microscopic means of disciplinarization of thought and affect
and the militarization of human relations", the latter to the extent that it
remains open to "singularization and creative initiatives".83 Revolution-
ary machines have two specific goals: to destroy the relations of capital-
ism and "to establish themselves at odds with every value founded on a
certain micro-politics of muscle, the phallus, territorialized power, etc". 84
Perhaps a little reluctantly, but in order to avoid once more the charge
that schizo analysis is a cult of the machine, Guattari elaborated eight
principles or "simple rules" in the form of aphorisms which would give
direction to the analysis of the machinic unconsious
85
: 1. "Do no harm",
act without prejudice, "remain just until the end"; 2. "When something's
happening, this proves that something's happening". This tautology
dispenses with the mystifications of the psychoanalytic understanding of
the unconscious and its secrets: the shrink says: "when nothing is hap-
pening, this proves that something is happening, in reality, something
24 Introduction
unconscious"; 3. "The best position to place oneself in order to listen to
the unconscious is not necessarily behind a couch". Who needs a cigar,
a dog, a room full of statues, a scorecard .?; 4. "The unconscious
compromises [moui/le] those who come near it" Those who encounter it
are carried in its wake; they are soaked by it, as it were, making the taking
of a neutral position impossible; 5. "Important things never happen
where one expects them" Or, "the entrance doesn't coincide with the
exit" What initiates a change isn't what effects this change; 6. Trans-
ferences made by "subjective resonance, by personological identifica-
tion" need to be distinguished from those made machinically
producing new assemblages by means of "a-signifying diagrammatic
interactions"; 7. "Take nothing for granted" There is no fixity of ident-
ity, and no situation is guaranteed; unlike the "guaranteed symbolic
consistencies" of psychoanalysis (castration), which Guattari calls "dis-
honest and dangerous"; 8. "Every principle must be considered suspect"
VIWC
Guattari developed a theory of post-industrial capitalism, which he
referred to as integrated world capitalism (lWC), through a series of
remarkable collaborations with Deleuze, Eric Alliez, and Antonio Negri.
Before considering how Guattari posed in a myriad of ways the question
of how to resist and defeat !WC, let's revisit the analysis of capitalism in
Anti-Oedipus in order to better understand the relationship between
desire and his theory of capitalism.
Using a tool of structuralist analysis, despite the anti-structuralism of
Anti-Oedipus, the synchronic time of the despotic State is distinguished
from the diachronic time of capitalism. Capitalism develops over time on
the basis of a series of decodings and deterritorializations including the
sale of accumulated property, and the circulation of money and workers.
Capitalism comes into existence "in a space that takes time", then, with
the conjunction of these and other contingent factors, a conjunction that
"constitutes a desire" and "actually produces a desiring-machine that is
at the same time social and technical". 86 It is not that these decoded flows
had yet to exist. Rather, it is the conjunction of them, some of which
existed for a long time in different social formations that were not so
marked by decodings but, instead, consisted of co dings and overcodings,
upon which capitalism establishes itself. Capitalism channels, however,
the flows into the guiding principle of "production for production's
sake" Keep in mind that the priority of production is not peculiar to
!WC. In the meantime, Deleuze and Guanari analyze in particular the
encounter or conjunction of two contingent factors: deterritorialized
Introduction 25
workers and decoded money. The worker-producer was deterritorialized
on the basis of the: i) privatization of the soil; ii) appropriation of the
instruments of production; iii) loss of the means of consumption through
the dissolution of the family and corporation; and iv) the favoring of work
itself over the worker. Money was decoded on the basis of: i) monetary
abstraction; ii) merchant capital's influence on the flows of production;
iii) public debt and financial capital's influence on the State; and iv)
industrial capital's control of the means of productionY Numerous
contingent factors made conditions favorable for the encounter of these
decoded and deterritorialized flows. Under such favorable conditions,
capitalism appropriates production and becomes "the new social full
body", characterized by a generalized decoding and becoming-imman-
ent. The capitalist machine enters into relationships with itself or
becomes filiative as it reproduces its immanent limits and the crises upon
which it depends in ever widening extensions.
Deleuze and Guattari specify that diachronic technical machines are
created by the synchronic capitalist machine and thus do not revol-
utionize the latter; that is, the latter revolutionizes itself through the
breaks and cleavages it introduces into the former technical machines of
production.
88
Technical machines are parts of social machines. The
generalized theory of flows that constitutes this theory of capitalism
reveals the schizophrenic process at the center of capitalist desire. The
desire for strength and impotenlZe go hand in hand with capitalism's
reproduction of its immanent limits. Anti-production exists, then, at the
heart of production; flows of stupidity effect the absorption of the suplus-
value of analysis and information, just as the absorption of surplus-value
is regulated by the introduction of lack in the face of abundance.
While there are important affinities between capitalism and schizo-
phrenia, the two are not identical. While it maybe that "our society
produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo or Ford cars,
the only difference being that the schizos are not salable", 89 capitalist
production both sets in motion and arrests the schizophrenic process.
Deleuze and Guattari contrast capitalism, as the relative limit of all
societies, with schizophrenia, as the absolute limit of capitalism. While
capitalism's relative limits are immanent, those of schizophrenia con-
stitute the exterior limit of capitalism that the latter wants to fill with
its own immanent limits.
90
This desire to fill by means of the reproduc-
tion of capitalism's interior limits smothers the revolutionary potential
of schizophrenia's decoded flows by means of apparatuses of domina-
tion and regulations enforced by the State. The relationship between
the capitalist and the schizophrenic is antagonistic. The decoding
of flows that is the mark of capitalism is accompanied by their immanent
axiomatization. This immanent axiomatic of capitalism has three
26 Introduction
features: i) its differential relations are filled by surplus-value; ii) the
absence of an exterior limit is filled by interior limits; and iii) the
anti-productive aspect of production is filled by the absorption of sur-
plus-value.
91
The social axiomatic of capitalism is never completely filled
or saturated because it constantly expands its own limits and introduces
new axioms. On the one hand, capitalism's energy for deterritorialization
seems boundless; but, on the other hand, it constantly confronts its own
limits that it allows to be overcome. Capitalism vacillates between pre-
capitalist or archaic-despotic overcoding and post-capitalist or schizo
decoding; between, then, reaction (paranoia) and revolution.
92
It is thor-
oughly mad. And it is constantly threatened by the external limit of the
schizophrenic process, which it meets with the addition of new axioms.
But De1euze and Guattari are hopeful that as the decoded flows continue
to overflow, the holes in the mesh of the axiomatic will be exploited, and
the libidinal breaks and breaches will appear suddenly and unexpectedly
here and there, at this or perhaps that precise moment, without an "order
of causes", thus, escapes from the axiomatic of capital will occur, be-
cause it is exhausted from playing a catch-up game of sealing breaches,
and outwitted in a game of guessing where the next renegade flow (not
an individual libidinal disposition, but a mUltiplex desiring-machine) will
emerge. While there is much more that could and perhaps needs to be
said about the theory of capitalism developed in Anti-Oedipus, this much
will suffice to get us on our way.
Let's try and place this theory within the non-general typological
description of the multiple forms of capitalist modes of valorization that
Guattari developed with the French philosopher Alliez.
93
Understood as
a "general function of semiotization", capitalism exercises an integrative
and transformative semiotic power over a diverse domain of machines
(technical, economic, social, desiring). It is, moreover, as we have seen,
a de territorializing power whose processual nature relies upon its avoid-
ance of despotism for the sake of the marginal freedoms it permits
around certain key power arrangements (production, for instance). From
the most diverse machinic operations (material and non-material) capi-
talism extracts and exploits a surplus value, having drawn them into its
exchangist "framework of equivalence". The double articulation of for-
mal economic and machinic content, that is, of a contradictory arrange-
ment rendering equivalent diverse forces in a closed territory divided by
legal and social rules, is imperfect and unequal, despite capital's happy
facade of symmetry and egalitarianism. The semiotic (i.e. economic) and
the machinic (i.e. libidinal) are not in opposition, but produce oppor-
tunities of renewal for one another.
Guattari and Alliez propose a minimal model consisting of three evalu-
ative terms: processes of machinic production, which they do not fur-
Introduction 27
ther develop; structures of social segmentation, considered in terms
of the state; dominant economic semiotic systems, considered in terms of
the market. Each historic mode of capitalistic valorization is described on
the basis of the priority given to one the these terms: The order of priority
for IWC is: production - market - state. Colonial monopoly capitalism is
also ordered by production: production - state - market. This is not
exhaustive, nor is it meant to be. It reveals, however, certain tendencies
and emphases which, in this case, involve rapacious imperialist powers
bleeding peripheral countries by holding commercial monopolies over
resources extracted for the home and world markets, with no regard for
the disorganization of the colony in question, nor the disintegration and
degradation of the people and the land. The state -(the distant imperialist
power and its feudal outposts) poses for Guanari and Alliez an interes-
ting question in light of its collapse and reconstruction in a "highly
artificial" form under certain post-colonial conditions.
What makes IWC "new" is its innovative means of semiotization and
increased capacity for the "machinic integration" of molecular diversity.
Here, production reterritorializes and capitalizes all of the segments of
social reproduction, the latter having the axioms of racism, sexism, and
conservatisms of all sorts. For this social-machinic capital, as Guattari and
Alliez refer to it, circulation takes the form of crisis and process becomes
that of p r m ~ n n t restructuration. Production integrates circulation,
information, and resegments society, giving to capital a "maximal sy-
nergetic fluidity" (a proliferation of fluid and mobile productive net-
works, of temporary labour, etc.). The state becomes the trader (and
even a speculator) in trans-national flows, free-trade zones, minimizing
and liberalizing (or rather decentralizing and privatizing) its national
responsibilities.
IWC may present itself as the "highest stage of capitalism", but for
Guanari and Alliez it is only one among other modes. Given its unpre-
cedented integrative capacity and fluidity, what are its limits? Whatever
the limits actually turn out to be, Guattari and Alliez think that !WC can
be brought down by "the development of new collective responses" and
molecular valorizations. In short, the theory of IWC is the background
against which Guanari's valorization of molecular, revolutionary prac-
tices needs to be understood in order to be fully appreciated.
Guattari's analysis of IWC is further developed in his work on gener-
alized ecology, as well as in the project for the renewal of communism
that he wrote with Negri. In "The Three Ecologies", Guattari outlines
the semiotic regimes upon which !WC is founded: economic, juridical,
technico-scientific, and subjectification.
94
These are not causally related
since "IWC has to be regarded as all of a piece: it is simultaneously
productive, economic, and subjective". 95 IWC produces certain forms of
28 Introduction
subjectivity by semiotic means and keeps them distinct by affording
one .. legitimation while cultivating resignation in the other. Guattari
specifies the two types of subjectivity produced and employed by capital-
istic societies: serial subjectivity (wage-earners and the "insecure" or
"non-guaranteed"); and elitist subjectivity (ruling social strata). 96
The main goal of Guattari's generalized ecology is to allow for the
resingularization of individuals and collectivities through the radical
questioning of the limited subjective formations of capitalism. Ecological
praxis in its broadest psychical, social and environmental senses must
identify "dissident vectors of subjectification" and work towards their
emancipation and maximization by opening up a-signifying ruptures
and creating conditions conductive to the formation of new subject-
groups.97
One of the goals of the ecological praxis of resingularization is to shift
capitalism from the era of mass media to that of post-media.
98
Guattari
and A1liez have argued that with IWC information becomes a factor of
production. Capital becomes cybernetic and seeks a global informatiza-
tion of society which goes hand in handwith global mass-mediaization.
IWC can then expand and exercise social control through its networks
and information technologies. Guattari repeatedly asked with regard to
this transnational computerization: "why have the immense processual
potentials brought forth by the revolutions in information processing,
telematics, robotics, office automation, biotechnology and so on up to
now led only to a monstrous reinforcement of earlier systems of aliena-
tion, an oppressive mass-mediated culture and an infantilizing politics of
consensus?"99 Emancipatory social struggles must insist on and protect
the fundamental right to singularity. This is precisely the goal of Guattari
and Negri's communism: the continuous reaffirmation and maximiza-
tion of singularization in all its processual unevenness, creativity, multi-
plicity and contextual variability. 100
With Negri, however, Guattari adds a new layer to the theory of !WC.
Intergrated World Capitalism remains a flexible semio-social science of
exploitation, but has at its centre the nuclear state. 101 Computerization is
inseparable from mechanization and militarization. Outbreaks of singu-
larization in the liberation movements of the 1970s, including the
disastrous "terrorist interlude" - challenge the translation of life time
into the "time of capital", that is, into exchangist terms. Nuclear terror
"became the only way to secure the resumption to capitalistic and
socialistic accumulation in the 19705".102 It has long been a central thesis
in peace studies that the mass media, science and technology are the
means for the production of militarism, especially in non-material forms.
Nuclear terror is for Guattari and Negri at "the root of every kind of
oppression and overdetermines the relationships of exploitation between
Introduction 29
social groups at both political and micro-political levels", including the
North/South axis of domination, and the West/East (especially former
socialist countries) axis of capitalistic integration.
In Negri's "Lettre archeologique" written to Guattari, the program-
matic nature of their renewal of communism still leaves unanswered the
question of social practice. But the answer will not be as immediately
forthcoming in Negri's mind as were the practices (i.e., wildcat strikes,
absenteeism, sabotage, as part of the refusal of work) that realized and
justified the program in the sixties. 103 It is worth mentioning here Negri's
moving refrain: "We [the struggles of the sixties] have been defeated" If
such defeats were strewn across the seventies, then in the eighties they
were consolidated for capitalism's sake. Negri wants us to fully appreci-
ate the gravity of this defeat in order to avoid both reminiscence and
repetition, but also to grasp the enormity of the critical task ahead. Negri
sees in this defeat, however, a premature cause of the enemy's modern-
ization. Automation, he suggests, "is freely invented by the knowledge
that springs from the rejection of work but is, on the other hand, applied
in order to break and mystify the generality of this proletarian and
labouring need". 101 The matter of the exercise of generalized social
control through information technology remains, for Negri, unresolved.
The production and reproduction of cybernetic subjectivity and the
dislocation and mystification of the knowledge possessed by the counter-
hegemonic forces have been used by !We to break the desire for social
transformation and reinvention. Today, then, transversal and alternative
struggles need to expand the little room they have to maneuver and rest
desire, the material and technical transformations of modernization, and
knowledge from the impositions of capitalism. There are many traps and
obstacles along the way.
Guattari's commitment to a politics informed by an ecosophical per-
spective in its most general sense had to rise above the sectarianism that
marked French Green politics in the early 1990s. Although Guattari was
at times active in both Les Verts, led by Antoine Waechter, and Gener-
ation Ecologie, led by the [then] Minister of the Environment, Brice
Lalonde, he joined the latter group at the national level, which is perhaps
not surprising given that they were the so-called "leftist" minority of the
movement that threatened what Waechter saw as the sacrosanct principle
of "neither left nor right" of green politics. Guattari wanted to playa
moderating role and openly lamented the split, while still reserving his
praise for Lalonde. Guattari's statement "Une autre vision du futur"
played the savvy political card of separating the quarrel from the plurality
of the ecological movement as a vehicle of reinvention in social, political
and personallife.
105
Many of Guattari's political lessons delivered in Part
I, "The Vicissitudes of Therapy", may be applied here in the context of
30 Introduction
the Green movement: reformism and utopianism must be resisted. The
Green equivalents of these are, respectively, the competing models of
so-called "shallow, short-term" ecology and mystical variants of "deep,
long-term" ecology. The very notion of ecology as both subversive and
scientific needs to be called into question. Whether there can be an
"ecology" that is closely tied to the potentializations of subjective singu-
larities rather than a bio-social interrelation must remain a deeply trou-
bling question for all those concerned with a green politics inspired by
Guattari's thought.
On another political front, Guattari did not live to see that his work for
peace in the former Yugoslavia, initiated together with Edgar Morin and
other members of the French committee of the Assemblee europeenne
des citoyens, as well as those enagaged in "transmediterranian dialogue"
cultivated by the French through the "Citoyens de la Mediterranee"
conference in Paris in early 1992, would be repeatedly frustrated by the
virulent interethnic hatred and nationalist ambitions that had moved him
to action on this issue in the first instance. 106
The struggles continue.
Gary Genosko, Kingston, Ontario, April 1995
Notes
Guanari, "Alternative ;l psychiatrie", in La Revolution molicu1aire, Fontenay-sous-Bois:
EncreslRecherches, 1977, pp. 147-60.
2 Guanari, ''L'erudiant, Ie fou et Ie katangais", in psychanalyst ec transversa/itt, Paris:
Franc;ois Maspero, 1972, pp. 230-1, n. 2.
3 See Roger Gentis, Traile de psychiam'e proruoire, Paris: Maspero, 1977, pp. 7-27. The
politics of the sector provoked the members of CERFI (Centre d'etudes, de recherches
et de formations institutionnelles) to publish a 600-0dd page issue devoted to it and
related questions entitled: "histoire de la psychiatrie de secleur, ou Ie secleur im-
possible?" Recherches 17 (1975). Recherches is the journal ofCERFI.
4 Guanari, RM, p. 147.
5 Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness, New York: Harper & Row, 1961, p. 308.
6 T. Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy, Garden City: Anchor Press, 1978.
7 Guanari,"La contestation psychiatrique", La Quinzaine litlliraire 94 (1970): 24-5.
8 Guanari, RM, p. 158.
9 Ibid., p. 159.
10 See Guauari, "Le 'voyage' de Mary Barnes", Le Nouvel obseroauur (28 mai 1973):
82-4,87,93,96,101,104, 109-10. It should perhaps be noted that David Cooper, in
his review of Guanari's L'Inconscient machinique, praised his "calling into fundamental
question classical conceptions. of the unconscious, and communication models
based on systems theory in the anempt to understand human and above all familial
interactions". If, for Cooper, this was Guanari's greatest accomplishment, he also
considered, for example, Laing's "paradigmatic utilization of fragments of dia-
logues . to illustrate the ways in which people, linle by linle, articulate (or undo)
their life in relation to the life of others' as more powerfully concrete than Guanari's
analysis of the characters in Proust's La Recherche du temps perdu". although Cooper
IntroductWn 31
understood that Guanari used Proust as an example of "how to understand the
assemblages and machinic territorialities in the act of untangling a certain micro-social
reality". Cooper was, in the end, unhappy with this rum to Proust as a political and
practical expression of Guanari's theory. Still, he looked for "zones of mutual enrich-
ment" between Guanari and so-called "Anglo-Saxon" thinkers such as Goffman and
Laing, aswcll as between theory and praxis (See Cooper, "Guanari, et notre implica-
tion dans les lunes quotidiennes", La Quinzaim littiraire 319 (rev 1980): 23.
11 Gentis, op. cit., pp. 213-14.
12 Guanari, "La contestation", p. 24.
13 Guanari, "Un entretien avec Felix Guattari" [Int. by Jean-Yves Nauj, Le Monck (6
sept. 1989): 19.
14 Guanari, "Urgences: 1a folie est dans Ie champ", Le Monde (9 mars 1988): 22.
15 Ibid.
16 Guanari, RM, p. 152.
17 Ibid., p. 153.
IS Ibid., p. 154.
19 Guanari,"La contestation", p. 25.
20 Guanari, RM, p. 157.
21 J. Oury, F. Guanari, J-C. Pollack, D. Sabourin, "La Borde, un lieu psychiatrique pas
comme les autres" [Interview by C. Deschamps and R Gentisj, La litteraire
250 (fev. 1977): 20.
22 Outy, "Une dialectique de I'amitie", Le Monde (I sept. 1992): 11.
23 Pollack in Outy eJ al p. 21; Guanari, "La Borde, un Iieu-dit", in RM, pp. 161--69;
Sabourin and Pollack, La Borde, orle droit d la/olie, Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1976.
24 Guanari, "Laing divise", La Quinzaine litteraire 132 (janv. 1972): pp. 22-3.
25 S. Turkle, "French Anti-psychiatry", in Critical Psychiatry, D. Ingleby (ed.), New York:
Pantheon, 1980, p. 174; Robert Castel, Le Psychanalysme, Paris: Maspero, 1972,
pp.21-3.
26 Pollack in Outy, et al p. 21.
27 Guanari, RM, p. 166.
28 Ibid., p. 162.
29 In Outy, et al p. 21. See also Marie Depussc, Dieu git dans Ies ditails, Paris: POL, 1993,
p. 102. She "quotes" Oury: "Mais, c'est une clinique, ici, on est II la campagne. C'est
mauvais, tous ces intellectue1s, pour les fuus".
30 Depussc, p. 145.
31 Oury, in "Un rameau saint-a1banais, une souche nouvelle: La Borde (1949-1954)", in
Recherclus 17 (1975): 165--66.
32 Lucien Bonnafe, "La Poete et les Proscrits", in EllUJrd, Paris: Les editeurs
Reunis, 1972, pp. 41-6S.
33 L. Bonnafe and Tosquelles, "La Resistance: Saint-Alban", in Recherches 17
(1975): SO--S8.
34 Ibid., p. 8S.
35 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (trans.), New
York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 96.
36 Guanari, "Un nouvel axe progressiste", Le Monde (4 juin 1992): 2.
37 Guanari, "Un entretien avec Guanari" [J.-Y. Nauj, Le Monde (6 sept. 1989): 19.
3S Ibid., p. 21.
39 Deleuze and Guanari, "1914: One Or Several Wolves?" inA Thousand Plateaus, trans.
Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987, p. 38.
40 M. Gardiner (ed.), The Wolf-Man and Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth, 1972,
pp.315-16.
32 Introduction
41 Deleuze and Guattari, "1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Im-
perceptible ... ", in ATP, p. 240. .
42 Ibid., p. 275.
43 Ibid., p. 239.
44 See, for instance, the explanation given by Ernest Jones, The Life And Work Of Sigmund
Freud, Vol. 3, New York: Basic Books, 1957, p. 141.
45 See Paul Roazen, Freud and His FoOowers, New York: New American Library, 1976, p.
499 and Mark Zborowski and Elizabeth Herzog, u/e Is With Other People: The Cuilure
Of The Shetl, New York: Schocken, 1952, p. 344.
46 See my "Freud's Bestiary: How Does Psychoanalysis Treat Animals?" The P1ychoana-
lyric Review 80/4 (1993): 603-32; and my "Introduction" to Marie Bonapane's Topsy:
The Story of a Golden-Haired Chow, New Brunswick: Transaction, 1994, pp. 1-31.
47 ''Wolves'', ATP, p. 32.
48 Ibid., p. 34.
49 Christopher L Miller, "The Postidentitarian Predicament in the Foomotes of A
Thousand Piauaus: Nomadology, Anthropology, and Authority", diacrilics 23/3 (1993):
6-35.
50 Gardiner, p. 12.
51 Guattari, "Transversa lite" , in psychanalyse ee transversa/ied, p. 79.
52 Ibid.
53 Ibid.
54 Ibid., p. 80; Sigmund Freud, "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego" [1921),
in The Pelican Frflud Library, vol. 12, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 130. It needs
to be said that these few remarks on the bestiary of Guattari are merely the tip of a long
talc which includes his writings on ethology in L'lnconscient machinique, pp. 117-53, as
well as, of course, his work on Little Hans, especially the animal phobia (more horses)
as a child's libidinal pragmatic in face of the familialistn of psychoanalysis, pp. 181-82.
See also his sense of the analysis of the institutional object in extreme cases in which
the imaginary of a group (miners) is suddenly destroyed (the mine is closed), and the
work involved in "guiding the imaginary from one structure to another, a little like what
happens in the animal world during moulting" ("Le groupe et la personne", psychana-
lyse et transversa/itt, p. 168). This sort of reading will not be everyone's cup of tea. It is
merely one among many other ways of reading.
55 E. Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, V. 2, New York: Basic Books, 1955, p.
59.
56 Guattari,IM, p. 182.
57 Ibid.
58 Therese Grisham, "Linguistics as an Indiscipline: Deleuze and Guattari's Pragmatics",
Sub stance 66 (1991): 45; see my BaudriOard and Signs, London: Routledge, 1994, pp.
57-71. This Reader emphasizes Guanari's creative elaboration of concepts borrowed
from Louis Hjelmslev's glossematics in the section on "Polysemiosis". De1euze and
Guanari refer to Hjelmslev as "the Danish Spinozist geologist that dark prince
descended from Hamlet" (ATP, 43). In spite of its reputation as an agent of linguistic
imperialism, Guanari has made g10ssematics serve the pragmatic ends of schizoana-
lysis. Guanari makes an arid alegbra ofianguage serve a pragmatics of the unconscious.
In Anri-Oempus, Deleuze and Guanari combined a critique of a linguistics of the
signifier with praise for Hjelmslev: "We believe that, from aU points of view and despite
cettain appearances, Hje1mslev's linguistics stands in profound opposition to the
Saussurean and post-Saussurean undertaking" (242). Hjelmslev's theory "is the only
linguistics adapted to the nature of both the capitalist and the schizophrenic flows: until
now, the only modem (and not archaic) theory of language" (243). Glossematics may
Introduction 33
be "schizo'" but was Hjelmslev schizophrenic? That is, did Hjelmslev not only think
like a schizo-analyst and theorize the schizo-process in order to free the flows of
language, but also suffer from something called schizophrenia? Was he another Artaud,
Van Gogh, Mary Barnes - a Judge Schreber whose breakthroughs enlightened us all?
Ami-Oedipw does not answer these questions. On the floors of conferences, in obi-
tuaries, in -diagnostic speculations, Hjelmslev's "depression", his "long and tragic
illness", are made reference to not as breakthroughs, but as breakdowns. For all the
care Deleuze and Guattari take in recognizing the dangers of turning clinical issues into
metaphors, and to the extent that Guattari bases his extrapolations on decades of
clinical experience, they have said nothing about Hjelmslev's "case".
59 All references to C.S. Peirce are from The Collecud Works, eds. C. Hartshorne,
P. Weiss, and A.W. Burks, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1935-66.
60 Guattari, RM, p. 310.
61 Ibid., pp. 310-11.
62 Guanari, 1M, p. 178.
63 Ibid.
64 Deleuze and Guattari, "Introduction: Rhizome", in ATP, pp. 12-13.
65 Guanari, 1M, p. 179.
66 Ibid., p. 187.
67 Ibid.
68 Deleuze and Guanari, "Bilan-Programme pour machines desirantes", in L 'Anti-
Oedipe, 2nd ed., Paris: Minuit, 1974; "Balance-Sheet: Program for Desiring-Ma-
chines", trans. Roben Hurley, Semiotext(e) 1113 (1977): 117-35.
69 Guattari, 1M, p. 190.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., p. 191.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid., p. 192.
74 Ibid., pp. 192-3.
75 Ibid., p. 193.
76 Ibid., pp. 47-8.
77 Ibid., p. 193.
78 Ibid.
79 Ibid., p. 194.
80 Massumi, A User's Guids ro CapiuJlism and Schill:ophrmia: Deviations from Daeuze and
Guaitari, Cambridge: Swerve, 1992, p. 152, n. 36.
81 Guattari, 1M, pp. 196-7.
82 Holland, "Schizoanalysis: The Postmodem Contextualization of Psychoanalysis", in
Marxism and the Inrerpreuuion of Culture, eds. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, Urbana:
University of llIinois Press, 1988, pp. 405-16. Guattari would have recoiled in horror
at Holland's notion of a "postmodern schizoanalysis", but may have been relieved at
what it actually entailed.
83 Guattari, 1M, p. 200.
84 Ibid., p. 201.
85 Ibid., pp. 201-3.
86 Deleuze and Guanari. Anti-Oedipus, p. 224.
87 Ibid., p. 225.
88 Ibid., p. 233.
89 Ibid., p. 245.
90 Ibid., p. 246.
91 Ibid., p. 250.
34 Introduction
92 Ibid., pp. 259-60.
93 See Guanari and Alliez, "'Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes", trans. Brian
Darling, in The Molecul4r &wlution, Hannondswotth: Penguin, 1984.
94 Guanari, "The Three Ecologies", trans. Chris Turner, Newformations 8 (1989): 137.
95 Ibid., p. 138.
96 Ibid., pp. 14344.
97 At issue here is Guattari's long-standing, non-absolute distinction between subjugated
groups and subject-groups. The fonner follow a path of reference received passively
from the outside; their cause is heard but by whom? The laner follow a path of
self-reference (they have the ability to assume an internal law), that is, of interpreting
their own position, with regard to their elaboration of projects and tools, and vocation
in general. At first glance, this distinction, while non-absolute, may not be as dialectical
as the Sartrean concepts to which it is indebted. The subjugated group is very similar
to serial being, with its exterior focus on an object in which a prior praxis is embodied
and its passive internal structure of mutual Otherness. The subject-group is a kind of
group in fusion, a genuine group, that has achieved fusion, having liquidated its
seriality and accomplished an active restructuration. But this would take us beyond
S,anre, because for him the group in fusion is stiD, even if it is united in "the flash of a
common praxis", united, that is, in mutual detennination by reciprocity, through a
,common object (a danger, an enemy) like serial being. See Sartre, The Critiq!u of
Dialectical Reason, Vol. I, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith, London: NLB, 1976, p. 253 if.
98 On Guanari's hopes for the transition from the consensual mass-media era to the
dissensual post-media era see, "'Pour une ethique des medias", Le Montie (6 nov.
1991): 2. Guanari envisages this transition on the basis of four factors: i) forseeable
technological developments; ii) the necessary redeftnition of the relations between
producers and consumers; iii) the institution of new social practices and their inter-
ference with the development of media; iv) the development of information techno-
logies. But for many communication theorists, "post-mass media" culture merely
provides yet another opportunity to demonstrate that the transition has not been
decisive, and to drag out and dust off old models. These theorists should be, as
Umberto Eco once put it, "pensioned off".
99 Guanari, "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects", trans. B. 'Massumi, in Incorporations, eds. J.
Crary and S. Kwinter, New York: Urzone, 1992, p. 29.
100 Guanari and Negri, Communists Like Us, trans. M. Ryan, New York: Semiotext(e),
1990, pp. 39-40. The questions of subjectivation and singularization run through The
Guauan Reader. I have emphasized the thematic of queer subjectivation in Pan V on
"QueerISubjectivities" .
101 Ibid., p. 54.
102 Ibid., pp. 53-4.
103 Negri, "'Lener to Felix Guattari on Social Practice", in The Polifics of Subvmwn; A
Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, trans. J. Newell, Oxford: Polity, 1989, p. 156.
104 Ibid., p. 157.
105 Guanari, "Une autre vision du futur", Le Mondt (15 fev. 1992): 8.
106 Guanari, "'Un appel d'Edgar Morin, Edgard Pisani et Felix Guanari", Le Monde (10
juin 1992): 2.
PART!
The Vicissitudes of Therapy
1
The Divided Laing
The clear-cut alternatives between good and evil, normal and pathologi-
cal, sane and mad, are perhaps about to undergo a radical modification,
falling short of the full understanding which could potentially be gained
from such a process. We notice only that a number of judgments, which
yesterday seemed self-evident, are now wavering, and that a number of
roles no longer function according to the norm of common sense. De-
viance has taken charge. There is now a revolutionary front for homosex-
uals [FHAR, Front homosexuel d'action revolutionnaire], a legal support
group for prisoners (Groupe d'information sur les prisonm'ers de droit com-
mun), and the "Cahiers de la folie", etc.
According to this new context, the importance of Ronald Laing, one of
the originators of English anti-psychiatry, lies in this "countercultural
movement which combines politics with the problematic of the univer-
sity",l as Daniele Sabourin has said. Laing is firstly a deviant psychiatrist.
For us, he was in the first place this frenzied and somewhat euphoric
character, whose flare up with David Cooper had the effect of a bomb in
the days of the study group Enfance Alienee, organized in Paris in 1957
by Maud Mannoni and the journal Recherches.
All of psychiatry speaks of the anti-psychiatry of Laing. But does Laing
himself still speak of psychiatrists? He is far, already very far from their
world and their preoccupations. He has undertaken this "trip.", which he
recommends to schizophrenics, on his own account, and he has aban-
doned his activities in London in order to meditate, so some say, in a
monastery in Ceylon. On the other hand, his books are surely there too.
It's impossible to avoid them, They irritate and disrupt specialized
gatherings. Public opinion gets mixed up with them. The French trans-
lations have succeeded one another: after The Politics of Expen'ence [La
politique de I' experience], and The Divided Self [Le Moi divise]; a theoretical
work appeared: Self and Others [Soi et les autres]; this was followed by
Sanity, Madness and the Family [L 'equilibre mental, lafolie etlafamille]; a
collection of eleven clinical monographs written in collaboration with A.
Esterson, and a disconcerting, un classifiable book entitled Knots
[Noeuds], sort of a collection oflogico-psychological poems,2 How can we
understand the public's infatuation with Laing? Since May 1968, it
38 The Vicissitudes 0/ Therapy
seems that a public has emerged which is particularly sensitive to every-
thing that touches upon the problems of madness. It is more than twenty
years after the death of Antonin Artaud, and to pick up one of Laing's
terms, the mad are about to become the hierophants of our society. The
order of things, the institutions have received such a blow that one can
no longer refrain from pondering the future, and scrutinizing with ap-
prehension every form of contestation, every protestation which con-
siders itself exemplary - the emotion aroused by the Caro affair was, only
five years ago, altogether unimaginable!
Seen in this light, one might expect that the oeuvre of Laing will find
in the future an even larger readership. Is it not significant in this regard
that an anti-establishment movement of urbanists, known as CRAAAK/
has used a poem on childhood from Knots as an epigraph of its manifesto?
Laing, Cooper, Basaglia, Gentis and several others have, in several
months, done more to change opinions about madness than decades of
patient and serious research carried out, for example, by the French
stream of Institutional Psychotherapy which is committed to never de-
parting from the concrete terrain of institutions of mental hygiene.
Nevertheless, it will always be necessary, in order to get to the heart of
the problem, to return to the overwhelming reality of the alienation of
psychiatric "populations", and to the inextricable predicaments in which
mental health workers find themselves every day.
In the last instance, it is on this terrain that the value of anti-psychiatric
theories must be appreciated. Anti-psychiatry will either be renewed by a
widespread, profound modification of the attitudes and the relations of
force in everyday practice, or it will remain what it is by circumstance: a
literary phenomenon and, as such, already largely "recuperated" by the
most reformist, indeed the most reactionary, currents which never shrink
from making verbal concessions.
It is necessary to admit that, up to the present, no anti-psychiatric
experiment has been long-lasting. All have been only gallant last stands
which have been liquidated by orthodox institutions. So far no mass
movement has suggested imposing a genuine anti-psychiatry (Cooper's
experiment at Pavilion 21 in London has had no repercussions; there has
not been another household like Kingsley Hall; and Basaglia had to leave
Gorizia, etc.).
Anti-psychiatry lays itself open all the more to reformist "recuper-
ations" because on the doctrinal level it has not freed itself from a
personalist and humanist ideology. This is true of Laing less than others,
but he is, at least a little, the leftist support for a current of thought that
one has to recognize as, altogether, in frank retreat from the contribu-
tions of Marx and Freud to the understanding of social alienation and
mental alienation.
The Divided Laing 39
Laing is in himself divided: revolutionary when he breaks with psychia-
tric practice, his written work gets away from him and, whether he likes
it or not, is used for purposes alien to its inspiration. This is perhaps how
his current Asian retreat must be interpreted.
When Laing writes that the most important new fact for about twenty
years is "the more and more marked discontent which greets every theory
or study of the individual that isolates him from his own context" (So; et
les autres, p. 98), this credits the most traditional forms of family psy-
chotherapy and psychiatry of the sector. When he holds society respons-
ible for the genesis of psychosis, one especially recalls that, for him, the
remedy will have to come from an "honest confirmation between the
parents" (Ibid., p. 123). We are, then, soothed by such a return to the
finer feelings, and prepared to be liberated from this object-cause of
desire revealed by Lacan following Freud; an object radically heteroge-
neous to the person, whose identity and localization escape into intersub-
jective coordinates and the world of significations.
In a note Laing worries about giving the reader the impression that he
would underestimate "the action of the person on himself" or that he
would minimize "what relates to sexuality awakened by members of the
family, that is, to incest" (L'equilibre mental, p. 32). No sooner has he
evoked the spectre of sexual machinism, than he reduces it to familialism
and incest. His search for a 'schizogenius' will never escape from the
personological "nexus". His project of an existential phenomenology of
madness amounts, in fact, to following "the twists and turns of the
person in relation to the diverse manners in which one is more or less
involved in what one does" (Soi et les autres, p. 160). It will be a matter
of nothing other than "recognizing a person as an agent" (Ibid., p. 124).
It is "false situations" (Ibid., 157) that are pathogenic. What must be
recovered is the "true selr' and "real confidence in the future" based on
the "true encounter", as Martin Buber puts it (Ibid., pp. 134 and 164).
We are not always convinced that Laing completely grasps the implica-
tions of his writings. At certain points he only commits himself with
reservations to the themes which constitute the common ground of
anti-psychiatry. For example, he is much more prudent than Cooper,
4
or
even Hochmann,
5
when it comes to promoting this famous family psy-
chotherapy which is essentially only a disguised return to techniques of
readaptation, indeed, of suggestion at the scale of the small group.
It is also with some reservation that he adheres to the neo-behaviorist
theory of Bateson called the "double bind" which consists of the reduc-
tion of the etiology of schizophrenia to a system of logical impasses and
to an essentially deceptive personological alienation in the order of
communication. Laing in particular shrinks from Bateson's affirmation
that "there will be a collapse, in any individual, of the ability to establish
40 The VicissilUdes of Therapy
a distinction between logical types
6
each time a situation of the double
bind occurs" (Soi et les autres, pp. 183 and 186).
Is it not obvious that a series of interpersonal breakdowns might not
suffice to produce a psychosis, even a neurosis nor, conversely, the
resolution of these breakdowns might not sufficiently modify them! One
sometimes connects too quickly Laing'.s phenomenological exercises
with those in the work of Sartre. In actual fact Sartre never tied himself
up in the mirror games which seem to fascinate Laing:
She wants him to want her
He wants her to want him
To get her to want him
He pretends he wants her
(Noeuds, p. 48)
Sanre is a man of history and real engagement. He would certainly
challenge the contemplative ideal which leads Laing to declare that we
can do no more than "reflect the decomposition that surrounds and is in
US".
7
Is it possible today, when it is a question of madness, to ignore
the contributions of Freud and Lacan? Is it possible to take refuge in a
personalist and mystical wisdom without becoming the uncon-
scious prisoner of ideologies whose mission is to suppress desire in every
way?
Let's hope that Laing, who has sought to dissociate himself in an
exemplary fashion from the traditional role of the psychiatrist, returns to
the concrete struggle against the repression of the mentally ill and that he
will be able to defme more rigorously the conditions of a revolutionary
psychiatric practice, that is, of a non-utopian psychiatry that is suscep-
tible to being taken up en masse by the avant garde of mental health
workers and by the mentally ill themselves.
Notes
This is a review of three books by R.D. Laing in French translation: Soi et les autres, trad. par
Gilberte Lambrichs (Paris: Gallimard, 19'71); a book wrinen with A. Esterson, L 'eqrn1ibre
mental, la folie ella jamiJ/e, trad. par Micheline Laguilhommie (Paris: Maspero, 1971); and
Noeuds, trad. par Claude Elsen (paris: Stock, 1971). It fint appeared in La Quinzaine
litUraire 132 (janv. 1972): 22-3. References to the French texts have been retained.
I 'L'avenir d'une utopie', La Nef 42 (1971): 222.
2 The translation ofthe book by Mary Barnes, one of principle figures of Kingsley Hall,
is forthcoming. (Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke, Two accounts oj a journey through
madness (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1971)]
3 Cirque Rurbain d'Animation, d'Action, d'Agitation Koultourelle.
The Divided Laing
4 Cooper, Psychialrie el antipsychiaE"e (Paris: Editions du SeuiJ, 1970).
5 Hochmann, POUT U1U! psychiatrie tommunClUl4irt (paris: Editions du Seuil, 1971).
6 At issue are the logical types of Bertrand Russell.
7 Laing, PoIiEique de I'expmence (Paris: Stock, 1970).
41
Translated by Gary Genosko
2
Franco Basaglia: Guerrilla
Psychiatrist
A war of liberation, waged for ten years to overthrow the traditional
institution is presented to us in terms of militant struggle, in a literary
fortnightly containing recorded accounts, book reviews, discussions,
journal extracts, personal opinions and articles. And it is done without
the least bit of pedantry. There is straightaway a violent refusal of all
scientific pseudo-neutrality in this domain which is, for the authors,
eminently political.
It all started in 1961. Under the impetus of Dr. Basaglia, the new
direction of the hospital brought about "a sudden rupture of working
solidarity" among the personnel and the breaking away of an "avant
garde" which refused to any longer fulfill the "mandate of the cure and
of surveillance" entrusted to them by a repressive society. Step by step all
services were to be opened: general meetings would be open to the
institutionalized, communications, the organization ofleisure, and socio-
therapy would be intensified.
At first "nobody would open their mouth"; but then there was a thaw,
and intense interest spread to all the departments. The hospital held over
fifty meetings a week, spectacular improvements were made, and patients
were sent home after 10, 15 or 20 years in the hospital.
Basaglia and Minguzzi then decided to undertake a detailed investiga-
tion into similar experiments in institutional psychotherapy in France
and therapeutic communities in England (i.e. at Dingleton, under the
direction of Maxwell Jones). They gradually developed their own con-
ceptions, distancing themselves from other attempts that they considered
to be too reformist, and questioning their own initial approaches.
Until then it had been the advance group - the "avant garde" - who
"granted privileges" to patients. The dice were loaded. In 1965, Basaglia
and his group decided to develop more thoroughly the "community
culture" which, little by little, gained ground and modified the real
relations of force between the personnel and the patients. Maxwell
Jones's ideas were subjected to criticism. They decided that the tech-
niques involved in reaching a consensus were, after all, only a new method
Franco BasaGlia: Guerrilla Psychiatrist 43
of integrating the mentally ill into a society answering to the "ideal of the
panorganization of neo-capitalist society" (Lucio Schiter, p. 149). The
famous "third psychiatric revolution" would be merely, as they put it, "a
belated adaptation of modalities of social control of pathological beha-
vior to the methods of production perfected over the last forty years. by
sociologists and technicians of mass communication" (p. 149).
Thus, they rejected every politics of improvement and the consolida-
tion of hospitals, a politics which in France had lead the most innovative
trends in psychiatry to collaborate directly with the Minister of Health,
and to elaborate, with the top-ranking civil servants, ministerial circulars
for the reform of psychiatric hospitals, etc. In the long run, this experi-
ence was deceptive and bitter, and it drove certain of the best of French
psychiatrists to despair. In addition, the recent psychiatric reform of
teaching, finalized by Edgar Faure
l
for the departments, must have
contributed to the spread of confusion among the ranks of the psychiatric
opposition after May 1968. The society of institutional psychotherapy
itselftook cover during the May movement, certain psychiatrists estimat-
ing "that nothing happened in May", nothing in any case that could
possibly concern institutional psychotherapy. Violently contradictory po-
sitions confronted one another during an international congress in Vien-
na in 1968, which Basaglia concluded by leaving and slamming the door
behind him.
In Italy, where the state of the hospitals and the legislation is un-
doubtedly one of the most archaic in Europe, such illusions can hardly
be dismissed - given the infamous stamp on the police record of psychia-
tric inmates; inmates denied their civil rights; and torture by strangula-
tion: "a sheet, usually wet, is twisted tightly around the neck to
prevent breathing: the loss of consciousness is immediate" (Basagila, p.
164). Basaglia harbors no illusions about the experiment of G ~ r i z i a
its future was doomed; at best, events would unfold as they did in
Maxwell Jones's therapeutic communities at Dingleton, that is to say,
in a "didactic and therapeutic engagement pursued on the staff level,
but which retreats into the particular domain of institutional interests"
(p. 100).
Unlike what generally happened elsewhere, the "psychiatric revolu-
tion" of Basaglia and his group was not "for laughs." From year to year,
we wimess an absolute escalation which has, moreover, lead to serious
difficulties for its instigators. The open door [policy], ergotherapy, socio-
therapy, sectorization - all these were implemented but did not cohere in
a satisfying way. Was it the context of the Italian "creeping May" that
entailed this permanent refusal of all self-satisfaction? Or was it the
indifference of the Italian state and its inability to promote reform which
discouraged every attempt at renewal? In any case, the "avant garde" of
44 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
Gorizia was no longer there: the "common goal" became "institutional
change", the "negation of the institution", the Italian equivalent of the
anti-psychiatry of Laing and Cooper in England.
2
The very honesty of this book leads us to question the desperate nature
of this endeavor. Is it not secretly preoccupied by a desire to bring things
to the verge of collapse? Isn't the dialectical process on the way to
transforming itself in forward flight and, in a sense, betraying itself? For
anti-psychiatry, political intervention constitutes the prerequisite of all
therapeutics. But doesn't the agreement around the "negation of the
institution", which has meaning only if it is taken up by a real avant garde
and securely achored in social reality, risk serving as a springboard for a
new form of social repression, this time at the level of global society and
aiming at the very status of madness?
Basaglia states that with the medications that he administers "the
doctor calms i ~ own anxiety in the face of a patient with whom he does
not know how to enter into contact nor find a common language" (p.
117). An ambiguous and perhaps demagogic expression: psychopharma-
cology is not, in itself, a reactionary science! It is the context of its use
that must be called into question.
Nosography, too, is perhaps a little rashly thrown overboard. The ways
of repression are sometimes subtle! Those who uphold normality at
any price can become more effective than the police! With the best moral
and political intentions in the world, one may come to refuse the mad the
right to be mad; the claim that "society is to blame" can disguise a
way of suppressing all deviance. Institutional negation would then
become a denegation - Verneinung in the Freudian sense - of the singular
fact of derangement. Before taking out an option on nosography, Freud
devoted himself to really giving a voice to neurotics, freeing them from all
the effects of suggestion. Giving up the idea of medical suggestion in
order to fall into collective suggestion would only create an illusory
benefit.
I think that Basaglia and his comrades might be led incisively beyond
some of their current formulations and "bend" their ears to mental
alienation without systematically reducing it to social alienation. Matters
are relatively straightforward and rightfully violent when it is a matter of
repudiating repressive institutions. Things are much more difficult when
they concern our understanding of madness. Then a few formulas from
Sanrean or Maoist sources will not in this case suffice.
Political causality does not completely govern the causality of madness.
It is perhaps, conversely, in an unconscious signifying assemblage that
madness dwells, and which predetermines the structural field in which
political options, drives, and revolutionary inhibitions are deployed,
beside and beyond social and economic determinisms.
Franco Basaglia. Guerrilla Psychiatrist 45
Fortunately, Basaglia's project has not fallen into a theoretical dogmat-
ism. This book is invaluable in that it poses a thousand questions that the
learned of contemporary psychiatry meticulously avoid.
Notes
This is a review of Franco Basaglia's L'institution en nigation, trad. de I'italien par Louis
Bonalumi (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1970). The original title of the article was 'La contesta-
tion psychiatrique'. It appeared in La Quinzaine litUraire 94 (1970): 24-5 and was reprinted
as 'Guerrilla en psychiatrie' in Guanari's psychanalyse et tranwersahou (Paris: Franr;:ois
Maspero, 1972), ppo 261-64.
In the Maspero edition Guanari added an explanatory fool11ote: "The final lines of this
article, arbitrarily cut by La Quinzaine, affirmed that above all the divergences a militant
solidarity is imperative. I believe this point muSt be reaffirmed at the moment when the
problems Basaglia has with Italian repression have presented an opportunity for the medical
chronicler of Le Montle, Madame Escoffier-Lambione, for an underhand anack which,
through this affair, looks at various attempts at renovation and innovation in psychiatry" (p.
264).
1 Edgar Faure was named Minister of (National] Education immediately following the
events of May 1968.
2 Cf. Laing, Politique de I'experience (paris: Stock, 1970), and Recherches, "Special enfance
alienee", II (Dec. 1968); D. Cooper, et antipsychiatrie (paris: Editions du
Seuil, 1970).
Translated by Gary Genosko
3
Mary Barnes's "Trip"
In 1965, a community of about 20 people formed around Ronald Laing.
They settled in an old building, Kingsley Hall, I in a suburb of London
which had been for a long time a Labour stronghold. Over the course of
five years the leaders of the anti-psychiatry movement and the patients
who, as they say, "made a career of schizoprenia", collectively explored
the world of madness. Not the madness of the mental hospital, but the
madness that dwells in each of us, a madness they proposed to liberate in
order to release inhibitions and symptoms of every kind. At Kingsley Hall
they disregarded - or tried to disregard - the division of roles among
patients, psychiatrists, nurses, etc. No one had the right to give or receive
orders, or to issue prescriptions. Kingsley Hall became a liberated parcel
of land, a base for the counter-cultural movement.
The anti-psychiatrists want to move beyond the experiments of com-
munity psychiatry: according to them, such experiments were only refor-
mist ventures which did not truly question the repressive institution and
the traditional framework of psychiatry. Maxwell Jones and David
Cooper,
2
two of the principal instigators of such experiments, actively
panicipated in the life of Kingsley Hall. Thus, anti-psychiatry had at its
disposal its own surface of inscription, a kind of body without organs in
which every comer of the house - cellar, roof, kitchen, staircase, chapel
- and each episode in the life of the collectivity, functioned like the gears
of a big collective machine, drawing each person out of their immediate
self and their own little problems, either to put themselves at the service
of others, or to descend into themselves in a sometimes vertiginous
process of regression.
This liberated parcel ofland, Kingsley Hall, came under anack from all
sides: the old world oozed through the cracks; the neighbours com-
plained about its nighnime activities; local kids threw stones at the
windows; on the slightest pretext the cops were ready to cart off any of
the agitated residents to the real psychiatric hospital.
3
But the real threat to Kingsley Hall came from within: the residents
were free from identifiable constraints but secretly continued to inte-
riorize repression and, furthermore, they remained under the yoke of
simplistic reductions to the tired triangle - father, mother, child - which
Mary Barnes's "Trip" 47
presses any situation considered to be outside the bounds of nonnality
into the mold of Oedipal psychoanalysis.
Was it necessary to maintain a minimum of discipline at Kingsley Hall,
or not? The atmosphere was poisoned by internal power struggles. Aaron
Esterson, leader of the "hardline" faction - he walked around with a book
by Stalin under his arm, while Laing carried Lenin - was eventually
ousted and, despite this fact, it was always difficult for the community to
establish its system of self-regulation. Moreover, the press, television,
and "hangers-on" ftltered in and out; Kingsley Hall became the object of
obtrusive publicity. One of the residents, Mary Barnes, became a star of
madness, which made her the focus of implacable jealousies.
Mary Barnes and her psychiatrist, Joseph Berke, wrote a book based on
her experience at Kingsley Hall. It is a confession of disconcerting
naivety. It is both an exemplary exercise in the liberation of "mad desire"
and neo-behaviorist dogmatism,
4
as well as being full of brilliant dis-
coveries and an unrepentant familial ism akin to the most traditional
puritanism. The "mad" Mary Barnes explains in several confessional
chapters what no "anti-psychiatrist" has ever revealed: the hidden side of
Anglo-Saxon anti-psychiatry.
Mary Barnes is a former nurse who was labelled schizophrenic. She
might also have been classified among the hysterics. She understands
literally Laing's advice on the "trip" Her "regression into childhood" is
undertaken in the manner of a kamikaze. Her "down" periods on several
occasions lead her to the verge of death by starvation. Everyone would
get in a panic: should she be taken to the hospital, or not? This precipi-
tated a "monumental crisis" in the community. But it should be said that
during her "up" periods, the problems of the group did not improve: she
agreed to deal only with those whom she had heavily endowed with her
familialism and mysticism, which is to say above all Ronnie (Laing),
whom she idolizes like a god, and Joe (Berke), who becomes simulta-
neously her father, mother, and spiritual lover.
In this way she establishes for herself a little oedipal territory that
echoes all of the paranoaic tendencies of the institution. Her pleasure is
concentrated in the painful awareness, which pitilessly tonnents her, of
the evil she unleashes around her. She is opposed to Laing's project; yet,
it is her dearest possession. The more guilt she feels, the more she
punishes herself, the worse her condition gets, unleashing reactions of
panic all, around her. She restores the infernal circle of familialism but,
by putting more than twenty people into it, only makes matters worse!
She behaves like a baby and needs to be bottle-fed. She walks around
naked, covered in shit, pissing in all the beds, breaking everything, or lets
herself starve to death. She tyrannizes Joe Berke, prevents him from
leaving, and harasses his wife to the extent that, one day, unable to bear
48 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
it, he hits her. Inexorably, one is tempted to resort to the well known
methods of the psychiatric hospital! Joe Berke asks himself how it hap-
pens that "a group of people devoted to demystifying the social relations
of disturbed families come to behave like one of them"?
Fortunately, Mary Barnes is an exceptional case. Not everyone at
Kingsley Hall behaves like her! But doesn't she present the real prob-
lems? Is it certain that understanding, love, and all the other Christian
virtues, combined with a technique of mystical regression, suffice to
exorcize the demons of oedipal madness?
Laing is without doubt among those who are the most deeply engaged
in the attempt to demolish psychiatry. He has scaled the walls of the
asylum, but gives the impression that he remains a prisoner of other walls
he carries inside himself; he has not yet managed to free himself from the
worst constraint, the most dangerous of double binds,
5
that of "psychoana-
lysm" - to recall Robert Castel's felicitous expression - with its delirious
signifying interpretation, representations with hidden levels, and derisive
abysses.
Laing thought that one could outwit neurotic alienation by centering
the analysis on the family, on its internal "knots" For him, everything
starts with the family. He would like, however, to break away from it. He
would like to merge with the cosmos, to burst the everydayness of
existence. But his mode of explanation cannot release the subject from
the grip of the familialism that he wanted only as a point of departure and
which reappears at every turn. He tries to resolve the problem by taking
refuge in an Oriental style of meditation which could not definitively
guard against the intrusion of a capitalist subjectivity with the most
subtle means at its disposal. One doesn't bargain with Oedipus: as long
as this essential structure of capitalist repression is not attacked head-on,
one will not be able to make any decisive changes in the economy of
desire and thus, in the status of madness.
This book is filled with flows of shit, piss, milk and paint. But it is
significant to note that it is practically never a question of the flow of
money. It is not certain how matters stand from this perspective. Who
handles the money, who decides what to buy, and who gets paid? The
community seems to live on air: Mary's brother Peter, who is without
doubt much more engaged than she in a schizo process, cannot bear the
bohemian style of Kingsley Hall. There is too much noise, too much
chaos, and besides, what he wants is to hold onto his job.
But his sister harasses him and he has to settle in Kingsley Hall.
Implacable proselytism of regression: you will discover, you will take
your trip, you will be able to paint, you will see your madness through to
its end But Peter's madness is far more disturbing. He is not very
eager to embark on this sort of venture! Here, perhaps, one can under-
Mary Barnes's "Trip" 49
stand the difference between a real schizo trip and a petit-bourgeois style
of familialist regression. The schizo is not all that interested in "human
warmth" His dealings are elsewhere, on the side of the most deterritori-
alized fluxes: the flux of the "miraculating" cosmic signs, but also the
flux of monetary signs. The schizo is not unaware of the reality of money
- even if it is put to extraordinary uses - any more than he is unaware of
any other reality. The schizo does not behave like a child. For him money
is a reference point like any other and he needs to have at his disposal a
maximum number of systems of reference, precisely to enable him to
keep his distance. Exchange is, for him, a way of avoiding confusions. In
short, Peter does not want to put up with these interfering stories of
community which threaten his singular relation to desire.
Mary's familial neurosis is quite another thing; she is continually
establishing little familial territories; it is a kind of vampirism of "human
warmth" Mary clings to the image of the other; for example, she asked
Anna Freud to analyze her - but, in her mind, this meant that Anna
would move into her place, with her brother, and that they would
become her children. It's this process that she tried to begin again with
Ronnie and Joe.
Familialism consists in magically denying social reality, and avoiding
all connections with real fluxes. There remain ~ y the possibilities of the
dream and the infernal locked-door of the conjugal-familial system or,
still, in great moments of crisis, a little ratty territory into which one can
withdraw, alone. It is on this level that Mary Barnes functioned at
Kingsley Hall: as a missionary of Laing's therapy, as a militant of mad-
ness, and as a professional.
This confession teaches us more than a dozen theoretical works on
anti-psychiatry. We can finally catch a glimpse of the implications of
'psychoanalysm' in the methods of Laing and his friends.
From Freud's Studies on Hysteria to the structuralist analysts currently
in fashion, all psychoanalytic method consists in sifting any situation
through three screens [cribles]: i) Interpretation: a thing must always
signify something other than itself. The truth is never to be found in the
actuality of intensities and relations of force, but only through a game of
signifying clues; ii) Familialism: these signifying clues are essentially
reducible to familial representations. To reach them one proceeds by
means of regression; one will induce the subject to "rediscover" his
childhood. In point of fact, this means a "powerless" representation of
childhood, a childhood of memory, myth, refuge, the negative of current
intensities which have no possible relation to its positive aspects; iii)
Transference: in the continuation of the interpretive sifting and familialist
regression, desire is reinstalled in a cramped space, a miserable little
identificatory world (the couch of the analyst, his look, his supposed
50 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
attention). The rule of the game is that everything which presents itself
must be reduced by means of interpretation and images of papa-mama.
All that remains is to proceed to the ultimate reduction of the signifying
battery itself, which must function with only a single term: the silence of
the analyst, against which all questions come up against. Psychoanalytic
transference, a kind of chum used to cream off the reality of desire, leaves
the subject hanging in a vertigo of abolition, a narcissistic passion, which,
though less dangerous than russian roulette, still leads - if it goes well -
to an irreversible fixation on valueless subtleties which will end by taking
him away from all other social investment.
We have known for a long time that these three screens operate poorly
with the mad: their interpretations, their images are too distant from
dominant social coordinates. Instead of giving up this method, at King-
sley Hall they tried to improve the screens in order to reinforce their
effects. Thus, the silent interpretation of dual analysis was replaced by a
collective - and boisterous - interpretation, 'a kind of communal delirious
interpretation. The method did find a new efficacy: it is no longer
satisfied with a mirror game between the words of the analysand and the
silence of the analyst; there are also objects, gestures, and the interaction
of forces. Joe Berke gets into the big game of Mary Barnes' regression in
a way that is still rare among typical psychoanalysts: he grunts, acts like
a crocodile, bites and pinches her, rolls her in her bed.
We're almost there! We are on the verge of breaking into another
practice, another semiotic. We will break the shackles with the sacred
principles ofsignifiance and interpretation. Not quite, though, since each
time the psychoanalyst recovers and reinstates his familialist coordinates.
He is caught in his own game: when Joe Berke wants to leave Kingsley
Hall, Mary does everything to keep him there. Not only has the analysis
become interminable, but the session has as well! It is only by losing his
temper that Berke manages to free himself from his "patient" for a few
hours in order to attend a meeting on the Vietnam war.
The interpretive contamination has become limitless. Paradoxically, it
is Mary who first broke the cycle through her painting. Over the course
of a few months she became a famous painter.
6
Yet even here interpreta-
tion has not relinquished its claims: if Mary feels guilty when she takes a
drawing class, it is because her mother's hobby was painting and she
would be upset if she knew that her daughter was a better painter. On the
paternal side, things are scarcely better: "Now, with all these paintings,
you possess the penis, the power, and your father feels threatened"
With touching industriousness, Mary tries hard to absorb all of the
psychoanalytic hodgepodge. Thus, in the communal atmosphere of
Kingsley Hall, Mary stands out like a sore thumb because she does not
want to work with just anyone. She turns away some people because she
Mary Barnes's "Trip" 51
wants to be assured that they are completely immersed in Ronnie's
thought: ''When I got the idea of a breast, a safe breast, Joe's breast, a
breast I could suck without being stolen from myself, nothing could hold
me back When Joe put his finger in my mouth he was saying to me.
'Look, I can come into you without controlling you, possessing, stealing
you'."
Even the psychoanalyst ends up being overwhelmed by the interpretive
machine he helped to set into motion. He admitted that: "Mary inter-
preted everything that was done for her (or for anyone else for that
matter) as therapy. If the coal was not delivered on time, that was
therapy. And so on, to the most absurd conclusions" This didn't prevent
Joe from continuing to struggle with his own interpretations, which had
no other goal than to make his relationship with Mary fit into the oedipal
triangle: "By 1966, however, I had a pretty good idea of what and who I
was for her when we were together. 'Mama' took the lead when she was
Mary the baby. 'Papa' and 'brother Peter' vied for second place. In order
to protect my own sense of reality, and to help Mary break through her
web of illusion, I always took the trouble to point out when I thought
Mary was using me as someone else". But it would be impossible for him
to break free of this spider' web. Mary had caught the whole household
up in it.
Let's now tum to the technique of regression into childhood and the
transference: their "derealizing" effects were accentuated by being de-
veloped in a communal milieu. In the traditional analytic encounter, the
dual relation, the artificial and limited nature of the session establishes a
barricade of sorts against imaginary outbursts. At Kingsley Hall, it was a
real death that confronted Mary Barnes at the end of each of her trips,
and the entire institution was overcome with a sadness and distress
equally as real. At this point Aaron Esterson resorted to the old methods
of authority and suggestion: Mary was on the verge of death by starva-
tion, and he forcefully ended her fast.
A few years earlier a Catholic psychoanalyst had forbidden her, with
the same measure of brutality, to masturbate, explaining to her, as- she
recalled, that it was an even graver sin than sleeping with a man out of
wedlock. It worked then as well. In fact, isn't this return to authority and
suggestion the inevitable correlate of this technique of regression on all
fronts? Suddenly returning from the brink of death, a papa-cop comes
out into the open:The imaginary, especially that of the psychoanalyst,
does not constitute a defense against social repression; on the contrary,
it secretly invites it.
One of the most valuable lessons of this book perhaps is that it shows
us the extent to which it is illusory to hope to recover raw desire, pure
and simple, by embarking on a search for the knots hidden in the
52 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
unconscious and the secret keys of interpretation. Nothing can unravel,
by the sole magic of the transference, the real micro political conflicts in
which the subject is imprisoned; no mystery, no hidden universe. There
is nothing to discover in the unconscious. The unconscious is something
to be built. If the Oedipus of the transference does not resolve the familial
Oedipus, it is because it is deeply attached to the familialized individual.
Alone on the couch or in a group, in an institutional regression, the
"normal-neurotic" (you and n or the psychiatrist's neurotic (the "mad")
continues to ask again and again for Oedipus. Psychoanalysts, whose
entire training and practice has saturated them with the reductionist drug
of interpretation, can only reinforce this policy of crushing desire: trans-
ference is a technique of diverting the investments of desire. Far from
slowing the race towards death, it seems on the contrary to accelerate it,
accumulating, as in a cyclotron, "individuated" oedipal energies, in what
Joe Berke calls "the vicious spiral of punishment-anger-guilt-punish-
ment" It can only lead to castration, self-denial, and sublimation: a
shoddy sort of asceticism. The objects of collective guilt succeed one
another, accentuating the punitive, self-destructive impulses by doubling
them with a real repression composed of anger, jealousy and fear.
Guilt becomes a specific form of the libido - capitalist Eros - when it
enters into conjunction with the deterritorialized fluxes of capitalism. It
then finds a new way, a novel solution, outside the confines of family,
asylum, or psychoanalysis. I shouldn't have, what I did was bad and, the
more I feel it's bad, the more I want to do it, because then I can live in
this zone of intensity of guilt. However, this zone, instead of being
"embodied", of being attached to the body of the subject, to the ego, to
the family, takes possession of the institution - Mary Barnes was the real
boss of Kingsley Hall. She knew it intimately. Everything revolved
around her. She just played with Oedipus, while the others were well and
truly caught in a collective oedipalism.
One day Joe Berke finds her covered in shit and shivering from the
cold, and his nerves crack. He then becomes aware of "her extraordinary
ability to conjure up everyone's favorite nightmare and embody it for
them" Thus, at Kingsley Hall, the transference is no longer "contained"
by the analyst, but goes in all directions and threatens even the psycho-
analyst. Everyone becomes a psychoanalyst! And yet, it very nearly
happened that nobody was the analyst, and that the desiring intensities,
the "partial objects"', followed their own lines of force without being
haunted by systems of interpretation, and duly codified by the social
grids of the "dominant reality"
Why did Berke desperately attempt to reglue the scattered multiplicity
through which Mary "experiments'" with the dissolution of her ego and
gives free rein to her neurosis? Why this return to familial poles, to the
Mary Barnes's "Trip" 53
unity of the person which prevents Mary from becoming aware of the
world outside with its potential rewards? "The initial process of her
coming together was akin to my trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle
without having all the pieces. Of those pieces at hand, many had had
their tabs cut off and their slots plugged. So it was practically impossible
to tell what went where. This puzzle, of course, was Mary's emotional
life. The pieces were her thoughts, her actions, her associations, her
dreams, etc."
What proof do we have that the solution for Mary Barnes lies with
infantile regression? What proof do we have that the origin of her prob-
lems stem from disturbances, from blockages in the intrafamilial system
of communication of her childhood? Why not consider instead what was
happening around the family? In fact, we note that all the doors to the
outside were firmly shut on her when she tried to open them; that's how
she came up against a familialism that was, without doubt, even more
repressive than what she had known during her childhood. What if poor
father and mother Barnes were only the pitiful, unknowing relays of the
repressive tempest raging outside? Mary was notjixated in childhood; she
simply never found the exit! Her desire for a real exit was too violent and
too demanding to adapt itself to the compromises of the outside world.
The first episode occurred at school. "School was dangerous" She sat
in her chair, paralysed, terrorized, and she fought with the teacher.
"Most things at school worried me ." She pretended to read, sing,
draw She wanted, however, to be a writer, a journalist, a painter, a
doctor! One day it was explained to her that all that meant she wanted to
become a man. "I was ashamed of wanting to be a doctor. I know this
shame was bound up - and here the interpretation kicks in again - with
the enormous guilt I had in connection with my desire to be a boy.
Everything masculine in myself must remain hidden, secret, unexperi-
enced."
Priests and cops of every type tried to make her feel guilty, about
everything and nothing and, in particular, about masturbation. When she
resigned herselfto being a nurse and enlisted in the army, she hit another
dead end. Once she wanted to go to Russia because she had heard that
there "women with babies and no husbands were quite acceptable".
When she decided to enter a convent, her religious faith was doubted:
"What brought you into the Church?"
And the priests were undoubtedly right; her desire for saintliness
seemed fishy. Finally, all this led to the asylum. Even there, she was
prepared to do something, to dedicate herself to others. One day she
brought a bouquet of flowers for a nurse and was told: "Get out! You
should not be in here!" There is no end to recounting the social traumas
and subjugations she suffered. Having become a nurse, her right to
54 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
higher education was challenged. Mary Barnes was not, at the outset,
interested in the family, but in society! But everything brought her back
to the family. And, this is hard to say, even her stay at Kingsley Hall!
Since the familialist interpretation was the game of choice of the place,
and since she adored everyone there, she also played along. But did she
ever play!
She was the real analyst of Kingsley Hall; she fully explored all the
neurotic forces and subjacent paranoia of her father and mother of
Kingsley Hall. Has Mary-the-missionary at least helped the anti-psychia-
trists to clarify the reactionary implications oftheir psychoanalytic postu-
lates?
Notes
"Le 'voyage' de Mary Barnes" appeared in Le nouvel observauur (28 mai, 1973): 82-4, 87,
93,96, 101,104, 109-10. It was first translated into English by Rosemary Sheed as "Mary
Barnes, or Oedipus in Anti-Psychiatry", in Molecular Revolution (Harmondswonh, Middel-
sex: Penguin, 1984), pp. 51-59. Sheed's tide was the one used by Guattari in the 10-18
reedition of La revolution 1tUJliculaire (1980). A second translation by Ruth Ohayon, "Mary
Barnes' 'Trip"', appeared in semiotext(e) Anno-Oedpius 1II2 (1977): 63-71. I have consulted
both translations.
Kingsley Hall, in Bow (East London), was leased for a five year period from 1965-
1970. It was one of seven experimental therapeutic community households in London
administered by the Philadelphia Association, whose chairman was R. D. Laing.
2 David Cooper, Psychiatry and Antipsychiatry (London: Tavistock, 1967).
3 Nothing is comparable, however, with the Italian repression which has destroyed less
'provocative' attempts and, above all, with the truly barbaric German repression,
currendy inflicted upon the SPK (Sozialistiches Patientenkollectiv) in Heidelberg.
4 Behaviorism: a tum of the century theory which reduced psychology to the study 'of
behavior, defined as the interaction between external stimuli and the responses of the
subject. The neo-behaviorism of today tends to reduce all human problems to ques-
tions of communication and information, ignoring the socio-political problems of
power at allleve1s.
5 A contradictory double constraint situated on the level of the communication between
a subject and his family, and which is completely disturbing.
6 Her exhibitions, in Great Britain and abroad, brought her a cenain notoriety. Much
could be said about this son of recuperation, "art brut" style, which consists in
promoting a mad arust. like the star of a variety show, for the benefit of the
producers of this kind of spectacleo The essence of mad an is to be above and beyond
notions of oeuvre and authorial functionso
Translaud by Gary Genosko
4
The Four Truths of Psychiatry
The slump that psychiatry and its shaky therapeutic grounds have found
themselves mired in over the last few decades cannot be accounted for
independently of contemporary economic and social upheavals. Some of
the anti-establishment and counter-cultural movements of the sixties
may have appeared, to many who had intensely lived through those
times, as the premises for profound transformations which later on
became woven into the social fabric. None of these transformations,
however, actually took place! History, of course, may have a few surprises
in store for us! But, while we wait, we may conclude that the recurring
crises of these last few years justified these movements. One can even ask
whether this was not one of their prime objectives. Whatever the hopes,
utopias, and innovative experiments of this epoch amounted to, all that
remains of them today is a dIm memory - cherished by some, full of spite
and revenge in others or, deemed to be quite indifferent by the majority.
This doesn't mean that alternative efforts and movements have been
definitively swept away, having lost all legitimacy. Other generations
have taken up the challenge where they left off, perhaps with less dream-
ing, more realism, and less mythical and theoretical baggage. As for me,
I remain convinced that far from having gone beyond the issues of that
period, the same problems continue to haunt the future of our societies,
in that the choice ill the time was either to gear effons towards human
ends by bringing about, through every possible means, the task of reap-
propriating individual and collective existential territories, or fast-for-
warding towards collective murderous and suicidal madness our
present situation providing an abundance of symptoms and indices to
this effect.
I believe it is in the context of this more or less roughly sketched state of
affairs that the notions of transformation within the field of psychiatry
over the last few years should be re-examined. To give a brief sketch of the
most notable events: the movement of institutional therapy in its early
period under the impact of people like Daumezon, Le Guillant, Bonnafe,
etc., who were committed to the humanization of old psychiatric hospi-
tals; the initial implementation of a psychiatry of the sector, with its day
hospitals, supervised workshops, home visits, etc.; institutional psychiatry
56 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
in its later phase, rearticulated by Tosquelles, Jean Oury and
GTPSI [Groupe de travail de psychotherapie institutionelle] in tenns of
psychoanalytic concepts and practices; the different movements aimed at
offering an alternative to psychiatry . All of these carried within them
a fraction of the truth without ever having had to face or consider the
effects of upheavals in society at large. In addition to their particular
contributions - which I would certainly be the last to underestimate - the
question of a truly radical reconfiguration, a paradigmatic change of
psychiatry, always seemed to loom in the background as a possibility.
Without putting myself in a situation of having to provide an exhaus-
tive mapping of this problem, I would like to delineate a few charac-
teristics of the necessary conditions for a complete progressive revival of
this languishing field - after all, this is the place to spill the beans! It
seems to me that we have to connect this exclusively to at least four levels
of intervention, to four kinds of truths:
1 the transformation of existing cumbersome apparatuses;
2 the maintenance of alternative experiments;
3 the sensitization and mobilization of these themes with the most
diverse social parmers;
4 the development of revamped methods for the analysis of uncon-
scious subjectivity, both at the individual as well as the collective
level.
The task, in other words, is to free ourselves, in a most radical way, from
the dogmatic shortsightedness and corporate quarrels that, for such a
long period, have fed parasitically on our reflections and practices. In this
domain, much like any other, one truth does not hound the other. Since
there is no universal remedy that one could prescribe and apply univo-
cally to all situations, the first criterion of concrete feasibility would be to
take on a project in which committed social functionaries would accept
responsibility for the consequences of all plans.
In the following few examples let us try to illustrate, for the moment,
how recent efforts directed at the transfonnation of psychiatry already
implied at least a minimum consideration of one of our four truths and
how they have also come up against their own limits by not having
concurrently weighed all of them - which, in tum, would have necessi-
tated a sufficiently consistent presupposition of the existence of collective
assemblages required for their commencement.
What has been tenned as the first psychiatric revolution of the post-war
years, which had taken the tangible material and moral amelioration of a
The Four Truths of Psychiatry 57
number of French psychiatric hospitals as its aim, could only succeed
because of its appeal to the following coordinates:
1 a strong progressive psychiatric standard;
2 a powerful majority of militant psychiatric nurses all in favor of
transforming the conditions of the asylum (leading, for example, to
the fonnative stages of the Centre d'entrainement aux methodes ac-
tives: CEMEA);
3 a nucleus of Ministry of Health officials pursuing similar aims.
It was by way of these exceptionally well linked conditions that an
effective intervention was made possible at the first level. On the other
hand, neither of the other three levels - alternatives, social mobilization,
and analysis of subjectivity - were taken up in spite of the fact that there
had been many questions revolving around these issues at the very heart
of the psychiatry of the sector.
The English communitarian experiments, developed in the wake of
Maxwell Jones, and then by R. D. Laing, David Cooper and the Philadel-
phia Association, have proved that they were endowed with a certain
social intelligence and an indisputable analytic sensibility. Yet they re-
ceived no support whatsoever from the state or from what we might
conveniently call the forces of the left. This denial of patronage had so
profoundly affected their. personal efforts that the movement lacked the
potential for rapid development within the field.
If we now tum to an experiment like that of La Borde - a clinic of a
hundred beds where Jean Oury has been the main inspirational force over
the last thirty years and to whom I remain personally indebted - we will
find ourselves in the presence of an extraordinary institutional clockwork
constituting a collective analyzer which, to my mind, is of the utmost
importance. There is no shortage of flaws attributed to its work by
external supporters, although according to different modalities than the
examples listed above. Let us only invoke the fact that in spite of Social
Security, this clinic has always been systematically marginalized from an
economic point of view while its lot, paradoxically, has not improved
under a socialist regime. On the contrary, it has deteriorated. While some
believe it ought to be treated as an historical relic, the clinic has remained
more alive than ever and has even found itself "carried" on a wave of
sympathy that has never failed it, and is attested to by the enrolment of
over a hundred French and foreign trainees. Meanwhile, it can very well
be regarded as having been condemned to isolation. An experiment like
this cannot acquire its full meaning unless it is placed within the context
of a proliferating network of alternative initiatives. The issue to be
58 The Vicissitudes of T1urapy
pinpointed here is the reevaluation of the role of hospitalization. It is
quite evident that one must urgently do away with all the incarcerative
methods of accommodation. This by no means implies the unnuanced
renunciation of structures of hospitality and collective life. For many
dissidents of the psyche, the question can no longer be posed in terms of
a reintegration into the so-called normal structures of the socius. In this
respect, all too often we have mythified the more or less forced and
guilt-ridden maintenance of, or a return to, the he an of the family. Other
modes of individuality and collectivity need to be found and it is here that
an immense site for research and experimentation is suddenly opened up.
I could list other figures to put into relief the discord of the four levels
of intervention that would illustrate ;tless ambivalent attitude on the part
of French public powers vis-a-vis alternative communities in the South-
West region of France where, for example, my friend Claude Sigala has
been caught up in a strange coming-and-going between the halls of the
ministry, those of the Depanment of Justice, and a cell in the prison of
Health! But I will content myself with a final example by referring to
Psichiatria Democratica and to the work of Franco Basaglia, whose
memory I honor here. This was the first movement to explore, with
similar intensity, the potential for work in the field that would align itself
with the forces of the left in order to seek ways of creating public
awareness and systemic action with respect to public powers. Unfonu-
nately - and this had been the object of a friendly debate between
Basaglia and myself - it was the analytic dimension that had blurred the
situation and which had often been vehemently rejected.
Why, you may ask, are you insisting, as a leittnotif, on your fourth,
analytic dimension? Should it really be considered as one of the principle
jurisdictions of our problem? Without getting bogged down in funher
elaborations, it seems to me that there is a possible cure for the leprosy
of our psychiatric institutions and, beyond the entirety of welfare ar-
rangements, I would like to speak to this desperate serialization of
misguided individuals, not only with reference to them as "users", but
also to their therapeutic, technical, and administrative roles. To conduct
an institutional analysis on a grand scale, one would need to make a
permanent effort to study the subjectivity produced in all relations of
social assistance, education, etc. A cenain type of subjectivity which I
will qualify as capitalist, is poised to sweep the planet: a subjectivity of
equivalence, of standard fantasy, of massive consumption and infantiliz-
ing reassurance. This is the source of all passivity, all the forms of the
degeneration of democratic values, the collective abandonment to
racism It is today secreted in massive doses by the mass media, by
collective apparatuses, by the allegedly cultural industries. It does not
merely concern conscious ideological formations, but equally encom-
The Four Truths of Psychiatry 59
passes the sphere of unconscious collective affects. Psychiatry and the
entire range of therapies have a particular responsibility: either they
caution us regarding their present forms, or they strive to branch out in
non-alienating directions. It is relative to this problematic that alternative
approaches to psychiatry and psychoanalysis acquire their significance.
They will have no real impact unless they align themselves with other
movements aimed at transforming subjectivity and can present them-
selves in multiple ways through ecological, nationalist, and feminist
interest groups that are sympathetic towards the fight against racism and,
in general, through conscientious and well thought out alternative prac-
tices that are able to properly gauge the perspectives of an ever increasing
crowd of marginalized and non-guaranteed people.
But this implies correlatively that parties, groupuscules, communities,
collectives and individuals desiring to work in his direction must be
capable of self-transformation and break the pattern of modelling their
functions and unconscious representations on dominant repressive mod-
els. In order to accomplish this, they must operate towards themselves
and the exterior, not only as a social and political instrument, but also as
a collective analytic assemblage of these unconscious processes. And
here, I repeat, everything has yet to be invented. Everything is ahead of
us. It is the ensemble of social practices that need to be questioned and
which demand to be rethought and retried.
This is basically what we have attempted to accomplish with the
"Reseau alternative a la psychiatrie" since its inception in 1975, and
which periodically organizes an international debate between the most
diverse, the most heterogeneous components of the therapeutic profes-
sion and its alternative movements. There are, of course, other initiatives
along these lines. I am thinking, in particular, about the gatherings in
Italy on mental ecology to be held at the end of this year, thanks to the
initiatives of the Topia group in Bologna, under the direction of Franco
Berardi.
The aim is to reaffirm, stronger than ever, the right (0 singularity, to
the freedom of individual and collective creation, and the removal of
technocratic conformisms; the goal is to do away with the arrogance of
all' forms of postmodernism and to conjure up and call attention to the
dangers inherent in the levelling out of all subjectivity that is being
promoted in the wake of new technologies.
Here are a few elements I would like to bring to your debate. Allow me
again, by way of concluding, to add three remarks pertaining to your Bill
180:
It was by all considerations of crucial importance to redress the
previous legislation and the complete return to the reinstitution of
the old structures of asylums and confront them as wholly reaction-
60 The Vrcissitudes of Therapy
ary and absurd. In France, the debate continues to go round in
circles with respect to the modification of the old law of 1838 (a law
that is segregative and contrary to human rights). 1 I fully agree with
Henri Ey in this matter: that the only solution is its suppression
pure and simple, and that all the questions that have been shelved
should only be taken up in the spirit of the Code of Health.
2 If one is to recreate the specific facilities of the reception hospital -
and I believe this is absolutely necessary - these need to be con-
ceived of as evolutive places of research and experimentation,
which is to restate just how much I am against having them reestab-
lished within general hospitals.
3 Only renewed forms of social mobilization will allow for the growth
and development of mentalities and for the possibility of overcom-
ing the always menacing 'anti-mad' racism. The initiative and
decisions in this domain ultimately do not lie with traditional
political formations, hampered as they generally are by their bure-
aucratic shackles, but with the reinvention of a new type of social
and alternative movement.
Notes
"l..es quatres verites de la psychiatrie" was presented in Rome (28/6/1985) at a conference
organized by the Italian Socialist Pany on the theme of "Psychiatry and Institutions". It was
collected in Les Annees D'Hiwr 1980--1985 (paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986), pp 223-232.
1 References to the law of 30 juin 1838 are commonplace in progressive French psychia-
tric circles. The result of cooperation between proto-psychiatrists and the government
of the period, the law had several far-reaching effects: i) it provided a legal justification
for the theory of isolation as a therapeutic method; ii) it gave legal status to the
sequestering of so-called "lunatics"; iii) it legitimated psychiatry as a profession; and
iv) led to the establishment of a nation-wide, public depanmental network of asylums.
Transklted by Charla Dudas
5
The Transference
]. Schotte
'
was right in highlighting the nature of signifying operations
that allow us to identify transferential phenomena with those of speech
and language. This ought to help us clarify the question of the trans-
ference outside of the strict field of psychoanalytic experience, that is to
say, of the transference as it manifests itself in the group or institution.
To the extent that we can regard the group as also "structured like a
language" - to transpose one of Lacan's expressions regarding the un-
conscious - the question can also be posed, perhaps, as to how it speaks,
and, above all, if it is even legitimate to consider that it gives us access to
speech. Can a group be the subject of its own enunciation? If so, would
this be by virtue of consciousness or the unconscious? To whom does the
group speak? Is the subjugated group, alienated from the discourse of
other groups, condemned to remain prisoner of the non-meaning of its
own discourse? Is there a possible, even if only partial, way our for such
a group that would allow for it to step back a little from its own
utterances and, in spite of its subjugation, become both subject and
object?
Under what sort of conditions could we hope to see a full speech
emerge from a field of empty speech - to borrow other expressions from
Lacan? Can we, for example, envisage in good faith and without betrayal
that there may be "for all that something to do" in situations as alienating
as those to be found in psychiatric hospitals, schools, and so forth? Or
must we give up in sheer despair, and live a politics where we resign
ourselves to the worst possible outcome, and make social revolution the
absolute precondition for any intervention in the local running ofinstitu-
tions by its "users"?
Or does the group and its non-meaning maintain a kind of secret
dialogue - harbouring a potential alterity? In this way, could not the
group be, even on the basis of its impotence, the carrier of an uncon-
scious call that might render this alterity possible? Even if only to speak
this impotence together as a group: "What does the unconscious [fa]
think of all this around us?" "What good is it?" "What the hell are we
c!oing there. ?" So, the subjugated group and the subject-group
should not be regarded as being mutually exclusive. A formerly
62 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
revolutionary contingent, that is now more or less subject to the domi-
nant order, can still occupy, in the eyes of the masses, the empty place
left by the subject of history, and may even, in certain circumstances
become, despite itself, the subject of the enunciation of a revolutionary
struggle, that is, the spokesperson of a discourse that is not its own,
though it may mean betraying this discourse when the development of
the relation of forces give it the hope of a "return to normalcy" Thus,
however subject it may be to socio-economic restraints, such a group will
- as a transformation of context would reveal - unintentionally retain the
possibility of a subjective cut. It is, therefore, not a question for us of
conceiving the alienating and dis alienating phenomena of the group as
things-in-themselves, but rather as the varying sides - that would be
differently expressed and developed depending on the context - of a
similar institutional object.
On the side of the subjection of the group, we will need to decode those
phenomena that encourage the group to withdraw into itself: leaderships,
identifications, effects of suggestion, disavowals, scape-goating, and so
forth. We will also need to decode anything that tends to promote local
laws and idiosyncratic formations involving interdictions, rites, and any-
thing else that tends to protect the group by buttressing it against
signifying storms in which as the result of a specific operation of
misrecognition - the threat is experienced as issuing from the outside.
This has the effect of producing those deceitful outlooks peculiar to
group delusions. This kind of group is thus involved in a perpetual
struggle against any possible inscription of non-meaning: various roles
are reified by a phallic appropriation along the model of the leader or of
exclusion. One is part of such a group so as to collectively refuse to face
up to the nothingness, that is, to the ultimate meaning of the projects in
which we are engaged. This group is a kind of a syndicate or lobby of
mutual defense against solitude, and of anything that might be classified
as having a transcendental nature.
As concerns the other side, the subject-group does not employ the
same means to secure itself. One is here threatened with being sub-
merged in a flood of problems, tensions, internal battles, and risk of
secession. This is so for the very reason of the opening of this group onto
other groups. Dialogue - the intervention into other groups is an ac-
cepted aim of the subject-group - compels this group to have a certain
clarity in relation to its finitude, that is, it brings into profile its distinct
death, or its rupture. The calling of the SUbject-group to speak tends to
compromise the status and security ofthe group's members. There thus
develops a kind of vertigo, or madness peculiar to this group. A kind of
paranoid contraction is substituted for this calling to be subject: the
group would like to be subject at any cost, including being in the place of
The Transference 63
the other, and in this way, it will fall into the worst alienation, the kind
that is at the origin of all the compulsive and mortiferous mechanisms
employed by religious, literary, and revolutionary coteries.
What might be the balancing factors of a group placed between these
diverse sides of alienation; that is, between the external one of the
subjugated-group, and that of the internal or borderline madness that is
the project of the subject-group?
Our experience in hospitals might shed some light on this question. We
know quite well that the "socialization" or reintegration of someone who
is ill into a group does not simply depend on the good will of the
therapists. In their attempts to reintegrate into a group or society, some
of the ill in institutions encounter zones of tolerance, but also thresholds
of absolute impossibility. We are here in the presence of a similar mech-
anism that is to be found in the rites of passage of primitive societies
when initiating or welcoming into the culture a sub-group that has come
of age. What happens.. if a person does not accept being marked by the
group? If we force things to their limit, we arrive at one of two possi-
bilities: either the group, or the recalcitrant individual, is shattered. Now,
it is precisely in those groups that do not cultivate their symptoms by
rituals - the subject-groups - that the risk of a face to face encounter with
non-meaning is much greater, but, consequently, so is the possibility of
a lifting of individual symptomatic impasses.
So long as the group remains an object for other groups and receives its
non-meaning, that is, death, from the outside, one can always count on
fmding refuge in the group's structures of misrecognition. But from the
moment the group becomes a subject of its own destiny and assumes its
own fmitude and death, it is then that the data received by the superego
is modified, and, consequently, the threshold of the castration complex,
specific to a given social order, can be locally modified. Thus one belongs
to such a group not so as to hide from desire and death, engaging in a
collective process of neurotic obsession, but owing to a particular prob-
lem which is ultimately not eternal in nature, but transitory. This is what
I have called the structure of "transversality"
Schotte emphasizes the fact that in the transference there is virtually
never any actual dual relation. This is very important to note. The
mother-child relationship, for example, is not a dual relation, at what-
ever level it is considered. At the moment that we envisage this relation
in a real situation we recognize that it is, at the very least, triangular in
character. In other words, there is always in a real situation a mediating
object that acts as an ambiguous support or medium. For there to be
displacement, transference, or language, there must also by necessity
exist something there that can be cut or detached. Lacan strongly em-
phasized this feature of the object as decisive for making one's way
64 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
through those questions concerning the transference and counter-trans-
ference. One is displaced in the order of the transference only insofar as
something can be displaced. Something that is neither the subject nor the
object. There is no intersubjective relation, dual or otherwise, that would
suffice to establish a system of expression, that is to say, a position of
alterity. The face to face encounter with the other does not account for
the opening onto the other, nor does it establish access to the other's
understanding. The founder of metaphor is this something outside or
adjacent to the subject that Lacan described under the heading of the
objet "a"
But what about this "a"? One must not make of it a universal key of
linguistic essence, an experiment of some new genre, or a new kind of
tourism that would permit one to visit ancient Greece, for example, by
effortless linguistic means. I am thinking here in particular of this per-
verse etymological practice brought into fashion by Heidegger. These
kinds of imaginary retrospectives have basically nothing to do with
Freud's genuine work on the signifier. I do not think that these etymo-
logical retrospectives are the carriers of some special message from the
unconscious. In my opinion, whatever Freud borrowed, rightly or wrong-
ly, from the realm of mythologies in order to translate his conceptual
arrangements, should not be interpreted "imagingly" [pied de ['image]. It
is the "literality" [pied de la lettre], in all its artificiality, indeed the
combination which is the key to interpretation for Freud. This is clear in
a book like Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious wherein we see that
the unconscious signifying chains in the term "joke" [mot d'esprit], for
example, do not maintain any special relation with etymological laws.
For the link can just as easily be made with a phoneme, an accentuation,
syntactic play or semantic displacement. Unfortunately - and it is not by
chance what was reified by Freud, and practically deified by his
successors, were the mythical references that initially came to him some-
what arbitrarily in his attempt to chart out and locate the dramatization
and impasses of the conjugal family. But let us not make a myth of myth!
As references, the ancient myths dealing with the topic of Oedipus, for
example, have nothing to do with the imaginary forces and symbolic
articulations of the prescnt conjugal family, nor with our system of social
coordinates!
It is an illusion to think that there is something to read in the order of
being, or of a lost world - or to think that recovering a mythical being, on
this side of all historical origins, could be institutionalized as a psycho-
analytic propaedeutic or maieutic. Considering the actual processes in-
volved in the therapeutic cure or in sening up a therapeutic organization,
reference to these kinds of mythico-linguistic reductions lead one no-
where except directly into the pitfalls of speculative frameworks. The
The Transference 65
important thing here is to get to the remarkable message, as well as to the
object-carrier and founder of this message. But such an object would
only derive its meaning on the basis of a similar retrospective illusion. We
cannot hope to recover the specificity of the Freudian message unless we
are able to disconnect it or sever it from its desire to return to the origins
- a modern myth that established its diet for a full outpouring of senti-
ments beginning with Romanticism: the infinite quest for an impossible
truth that supposedly lies beyond the manifest, in the heart of nature and
the dark night of existence.
The remedy for this desire consists in orienting oneself in the direction
of history, and the direction of the diachronic cut-out of the real and its
provisional and partial attempts towards totalization - what I would call
the bricolage of history and social constructions. It is impossible to carry
out such a reconfiguration if we do not as a precondition ask the ques-
tion: where is the law? Is it behind us? Behind history? Does it fall
short of our actual-situation, in which case it would lie outside our grasp?
Or is it, perhaps, before us, within our reach, and potentially retriev-
able? As Bachelard says: nature must be pushed at least as far as our
minds.
2
Who will. ask this question? Certainly not the groupings and
societies who establish their reason for being on ahistorical systems of
religious and political legitimacy. The only groups to ask this question
are the ones that accept from the start the precarious and transient
nature of their existence: lucidly accept the situational and historical
contingencies that confront them; accept an encounter with nothing-
ness; and, finally, refuse to mystically reestablish and justify the existing
order.
Today, a psychoanalyst would be content ifhis analysand overcame his
anachronistic fixations; ifhe were able, for example, to get married, have
children, reconcile himself to his biological contingencies, and integrate
himself into the status quo. Regardless of the particular psychoanalytic
curriculum, a reference to a predetermined model of normality remains
implicit within its framework. The analyst, of course, does not in prin-
ciple expect that this normalization is the product of a pure and simple
identification of the analysand with the analyst, but it works no less, and
even despite him (if only from the point of view of the continuity of the
treatment, that is to say, often from the capacity of the analysand to
continue to pay), as a process of identification of the analysand with a
human profile that is compatible with the existing social order, and the
acceptance [assumation] of his branding by the cogs of production and
institutions. The analyst does not find this model ready-made in present
society. His work is to create just that: to forge a new model in the place
where his patient is lacking one. Moreover, and generally, this has to be
his work, given that the modern bourgeois, capitalist society no longer
66 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
has any satisfactory model at its disposal. It is in order to respond to this
deficiency that psychoanalysis borrows its myths from earlier societies. It
is thus that psychoanalysis proposes a model of drives and an ideal type
of subjectivity and of familial relations that is at once new and composite;
a kind of syncretism that encompasses elements of an archaic nature, and
some that are quite modem. As far as the dominant social order is
concerned, what is important is that the model be in a position to
function in the present society. Such is the meaning of this requisite
acceptance [assumation] of the castration complex - a kind of initiation
substitution for modem societies - as the possible outcome of Oedipal
impasses. This also accounts for the success and profitability of psycho-
analysis.
For us the question is of a completely different kind. Our problem is to
find out whether this recourse to alienating models can be limited,
whether it is possible to establish the laws of subjectivity in places other
than social constraint and the mystifying means of these mythical com-
posite references. My question, therefore, is: can man become the
founder of his own law?
Let us attempt afresh to resituate certain key concepts. If a totalizing
god of values exists, every system of metaphoric expression will remain
connected to the subjugated group by a kind of fantasmatic umbilical
cord connecting it to this system of divine totalization. So as to not
stretch this formulation, and in order to avoid, at whatever cost, falling
into an idealist option, let us begin with the idea that we no longer need
consider that such a totalizing system is to be sought at the level of human
ramification, as if transmitted from sperm to sperm. While a medium of
transmission certainly exists, this does not translate into it being an
actual message. Spermatozoids, after all, do not speak! Also, from the
point of view of meaning, this transmission eludes all the orders which
are said to be "structured like a language" Taken as a system of refer-
ence, the order of human values is but an inch away from the systems of
divine positionality. What is transmitted from the pregnant woman to her
child? Quite a bit: nourishment and antibodies, for example. But not just
these obvious things. For what is transmitted above all are the fundamen-
tal models of our industrial society. While there is still no speech here
there is already a message. The message concerns industrial society; it is
a specific message and differs according to the place one occupies within
this order. We are here already in the signifier, though not yet in speech
or in language. While the transmitted message has hardly anything to do
with the structural laws of linguistics or etymology, it has a great deal to
do with all those heterogeneous things that converge in the aforemen-
tioned idea of human ramification. Everything that concerns man in his
relation to the most primitive demand is clearly marked by the signifier,
The Transference 67
but not necessarily by a signifier that panakes of a more or less universal
linguistic essence.
All that attempts to speak in this way-though is not yet at the level of
speech, but rather has to do with transference, transmission, or exchange
-can be characterized as what can be cut, and as something that allows
for the signifiers' play of aniculation. If the objects of transmission,
gestures, and glances result in rendering possible the nourishment of a
child this is because, at all levels, these things have already been marked
and have a direct effect on this system of signifying chains. What is the
law of exchange at this level? It is impossible to avoid this question! It is
played out and exposes itself anew at every turn. We are faced with a
fundamental precariousness in the structure of exchange, as this signifier
that is not "crystallized" like a language is clearly at the foundation of
society and, in the final analysis, at the foundation of all the signifying
systems, including linguistics.
If speech does not exist in the animal realm, this is because the
system of transmission and of totalization of this order has until now
been able to do without speech, which is not the case for the degenerate
branch of humanity; this is so because the relations of speech, image,
and the transference in man are tied to a fundamental deficiency
what Lacan calls a "dehiscence at the he an of the organism,,3 - which,
funhermore, constrains man to have recourse to various forms of social
division of labor in order to survive. In the future, this survival
will depend on the capacity of cybernetic machines to resolve humanity's
problems. It will, therefore, be impossible to respond to the attack of
a new virus without the intervention of continuously advancing com-
puters.
If I evoke this myth of the machine, it is to highlight the absurdity of
the situation. Is the computer in question God? Or perhaps it is God
himself who predetermined these successive versions so that they would
respond to all sons of more or less contingent problems such as, for
example, the novel strategic calculations that would be required in a new
cold war. After all, this myth illustrates better the impasses of present
society than the staid references to the habitual imagery of familialism,
regionalism, nationalism, which, moreover, suffer the disadvantage of
serving to reinforce forms of social neurosis to the same extent that they
are unable to respond to the goals they have set out for themselves. In
fact, this traditional imagery would probably be incapable of sustaining
its subjugating function were it not for the incessant work of misrecogni-
tion and the neurosis of civilization, forever condemning the subject to
compUlsively resort to degenerate forms of need - needs that are at once
blind and without object, and addressed to a god that has become idiotic
and evil.
68 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
Notes
This shon presentation to the GTPSI (Groupe de travail de psychotherapie institutionnelle,
which is also referred to as the Groupe de travail de psychologie et sociologie institution-
nelle) appeared in Psychanolysl It lTa7lS'fJersalite (Paris: Maspero, 1972), pp. 52-58. It dates
from 1964. GTPSI was founded in 1960. Upon expansion in 1965 it became known as the
SPI (Societe de psychotherapie institutionnelle).
1 See J. Schone, "I.e Transfen dit fondamental de Freud pour poser Ie probleme:
psychanalyse et institution", Rnnu de psychotherapil institutionnllU 1 (1965). All issues
of this Revue are to my knowledge out of prinL
2 Gaston Bachelard, PhiJosophie du non (paris: PUF), p. 36.
3 Jacques Laean, Ecrils (Paris: Editions du Seull, 1966), p. 96. [Ecrils: A Selection, trans.
Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Nonon, 1977), p. 4.]
Translated by John Canuma
6
Psychoanalysis Should Get a Grip on
Life
Anti-Oedipus managed to stir things up a bit with its severe criticism of
the "familialism" of psychoanalysis. After about ten years, however, this
has now become a banal issue. Nearly everyone realized that that criti-
cism had the ring of truth. I duly respect Freud, for what he represents;
he was incredibly Creative. His strokes of both genius and folly were
rejected as he re!llained marginalized, kept at the peripheries of the
scientific and medical arenas, over a rather long period of his life, and it
was during this -period of marginalization that he managed to
draw attention to subjective facts which had been, until then, totally
mistaken. His successors, however, in particular those of the Lacanian
structuralist strain, have psychoanalysis into a cult, turning
psychoanalytic theory into a kind of theology celebrated by affected and
pretentious sects which are still proliferating. At the time of my studies at
the Ecole freudienne, I was struck by the schism that inserted itself
between the sophistication of the theoretical propositions taught there
and the attitude people had developed vis-a-vis the clinical domain.
Those with discourses that were not particularly brilliant and short on
razzle-dazzle, still managed to hold down a fairly reasonable practice
while, inversely, those known for distinguished and elegant discourses
employed in their monkey-see-monkey-do mimicking of the Master,
often behaved outright irresponsibly in therapy. To take charge of some-
one's life and direct its outcome, all the while running the risk of perhaps
having all efforts lead one down a blind alley, is a matter of no little
significance! There are people who come to you in total disarray, who are
very vulnerable and very responsive to your suggestions, so much so that
if the transference gets off on a bad footing the peril of alienating the
person becomes a real threat. This phenomenon is not peculiar to the
domain of psychoanalysis. Most of us are certainly aware of other exam-
ples of grand theories that have been employed for religious and per-
verted purposes and have had dreadful consequences (I can think of the
Pol Pot regime in Cambodia or of certain Marxist-Leninist groups in
South America ... ).
70 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
In short, this method of furthering the cause of psychoanalysis no
longer holds much water; others continue to do it with great talent - for
example, Robert Castel. 1 On the other hand, one must admit that it is
also important not to tip the scale and sink into reductionist, neo-beha-
viourist or systemist perspectives so typical of the Anglo-Saxon tradition
which are currently conveyed by trends in family therapy.
Should one wish to go beyond this critical point to envision possi-
bilities for the reconstruction of analysis on a different basis, I feel it is
important to restate the question in terms of its status as a myth of
reference. In order to live one's life - one's madness as well as one's
neurosis, desire, melancholy, or even one's quotidian "normality" - each
individual is bound to refer to a certain number of public or private
myths. In ancient societies these myths had social consistency sufficient
to allow for a system of reference with respect to morals, religion, sex,
etc., in a manner that was much less dogmatic compared to what we have
today; hence, in the case of a sacrificial exploration, the collectivity
sought out ways to locate the kind of spirit dwelling within the sick
person and to uncover the cultural, social, mythical and affective nature
of the transgression. If a practical ritual no longer worked, one oriented
on self in another direction without pretending that one had come up
against a resistance. These people probed subjectivity with an indisput-
able pragmatism and with an appeal to codes of conduct shared by the
whole social body t provided the testing grounds for the effects of these
codes. This is far from being the case with our psychological and psycho-
analytic methods!
In societies where human faculties are highly integrated, the mythical
systems of reference, at the very beginning, were taken over by great
monotheistic religions which strived to respond to the cultural demand
of castes, national groups and social classes. In time, all this collapsed
with the deterritorialization of the ancient forms of filiation, of the clan,
the community, the chiefs, etc. Consequently, the great monotheistic
religions in their tum declined and lost a major portion of the direct sway
they once held over collective SUbjective realities. (Aside from certain
paradoxical situations today like those of Poland or Iran where religious
ideologies have recovered their structural function for a whole nation. I
draw on these two examples for their symmetric and, at the same time,
antinomic nature: the latter leaning towards fascism, the former towards
social liberation.) Generally speaking, however, reference to sin, confes-
sion, and prayer no longer carry the same weight as they once did; nor
can they intervene any longer in the same manner in the problems of
individuals held in the grip of psychotic intensity, neurosis or whatever
form of mental distress. To make up for this loss, we can often see
spectacular and daring ventures to bring back onto the modem scene
Psychoanalysis Should Get a Grip on Life 71
animistic religions and traditional approaches to medicine in countries
like Brazil with the candomble, Macumba and Voodoo, etc.
To compensate for the relapse of these religions, great devices of
sUbjectivation have emerged as conduits of modem myths: from the
bourgeois novel of Jean-Jacques Rousseau to James Joyce, from
the star-system of cinema to hit songs and sports and, generally speaking,
the whole array of what we recognize today as mass-mediated culture.
Only here we are talking of ruptured family myths. Psychoanalysis and
family therapy constitute in their own right a kind of background refer-
ence, providing a body and a serious demeanor for this profane sub-
jectivation. To restate my point, it seems to me that nobody can
possibly organize their life independently of these subjective forma-
tions of reference. When one is through with one of them - whether it has
lost its motivating force, or whether it is reduced to the level of banality
one sees that in spite of its degeneration and impoverishment, it
continues to survive. This is perhaps the case with Freudianism and
Marxism. Unless they are replaced in their role as collective myths, they
will never wither away! They have, in fact, become a kind of chronic
collective delirium. Take the end of the Hitlerian paradigm, for example:
the matter was already lost in 1941 and 1942; but it was seen through to
the end, to total disaster, and it has managed to linger well after its end.
As Kuhn pointed out so well with reference to scientific paradigms, a
body of explication that loses its consistency is never simply replaced by
a more credible alternative. It retains its place and hangs on like an ailing
patient.
Under these conditions it is useless even to attempt to demonstrate in
a rational way the absurdity of most psychoanalytic hypotheses. One has
to drain one's own cup to the last drop! And this probably applies just as
well to the systematization of family therapy. Psychologists and social
workers today display a certain avidity for rediscovering frames of refer-
ence. The university is poised as a resource to supply them with scientific
bases. In most of the cases, however, all we are dealing with are reduc-
tionist theories that position themselves side-by-side with real problems
- a metonymic scientificity, in a manner of speaking. In fact, when the
users go to see a shrink, they know very well that they are not dealing with
real scientists, but with people who present themselves as servers in a
particular problematic order. In the past, when people went to see a
priest, the servant of God, they were to some extent familiar with his
methods of proceeding, his intimate ties with his maid, with the neigh-
bours, and had some idea of his way of thinking. Psychoanalysts are, no
doubt, people held in high esteem! However, they are far more isolated
and, in my opinion, will not continue to carry on with their business
much longer by referring to deflated myths.
72 The Vicissitudes of Therapy
Once the necessity, or dare I say even the legitimacy, of mythic refer-
ences is understood, the question is no longer aimed at their scientific
validity but is redirected towards their socialfuncrionality. This is the true
site of theoretical research in this domain. One can theorize a production
of subjectivity in a given context, within a particular group or with
respect to a neurosis or psychosis, without having to resort to the author-
ity of science in the matter and refer instead to something that would
imply a formalization of a sense of the universal in order to affirm itself
as a universal truth. I feel a strong urge to underline that we are not
talking about ways to crcate a general theory for the human sciences - not
even for the social and juridical sciences - since theorization, in all the
matters it may encompass, cannot amount to more than what I call a
descriptive or functional cartography. In my estimation, this would in-
volve an invitation to all parties and groups concerned, in accordance
with the appropriate modalities, to participate in the activity of creating
models that touch on their lives. Furthermore, it is precisely the study of
these modalities that I perceive as being the essence of analytic theoriz-
ing. I read in the papers quite recently that twenty million Brazilians are
on the brink of dying of hunger in the north-east part of the country,
which may lead to the engendering of a race of autistic dwarfs. In order to
understand and hclp this population, references to symbolic castration,
the signifier or the Name of the Father would hardly amount to more
than a paltry form of support!
On the other hand, people who need to confront these types of challen-
ges would make unmistakable gains were they able to create a certain
number of social instruments and functional concepts to deal with the
situation. The political dimension of the production of subjectivity is
clearly evident in such a case. Yet it goes beyond that under the auspices
of other modalities and into different contexts. I repeat, therefore, the
less the shrinks see themselves as scientists, the more they will take heed
of their responsibilities; we are not talking about an air of guilt ridden
responsibility displayed by those who pretend to be speaking in the name
of truth or history. I belong to a generation who wimessed the attacks on
J.-P. Sartre, where some people imagined, in the age of La Nausee, that
they knew for certain the reasons behind suicide and delinquency among
the youth of that period, and held him responsible for all of it. Intellec-
tuals who labor on the building of theories sometimes caution us against
states of affairs they disapprove of and will even take some responsibility
for the consequences that follow from the theory. This, however, only
seldom amounts to a direct assuming of responsibility. On the other
hand, they often frequently exert an inhibiting function by treading,
unwarranted, on a terrain where they constrain the emergence of certain
problems that could be looked at from more constructive angles. I always
Psychoanalysis Slwuld Get a Grip on Life 73
find myself politically involved in various ways and degrees. I have been
participating in social movements since my childhood and, moreover, I
became a psychoanalyst. This has led me to reject any tight compartmen-
talization between the individual and society. In my view, the singular
and collective dimensions always tend to merge. If one refuses to situate
a problem in its political and micropolitical context, one ends up steriliz-
ing its impact of truth. To intervene with one's intelligence and one's
means, as feeble as they may be, or as simple as they may appear,
nevertheless, remains quite essential. And this is an integral part of any
propaedeutic, of any conceivable didactic process.
After 1968, psychologists, psychiatrists, caretakers on mental wards,
were all seen as cops. This we have to admit! But where does this begin,
where does this end? What is important is to determine whether the
position one occupies will, or will not, contribute to the overcoming of
the realities of segregation, social and psychological mutilation, and
whether one will, at least, be able to minimize the damage.
Notes
This a.rticle "La psychanalyse doit etre en prise directe avec 1a vie" [propos recueillis par
Michele Costa-Magna et Jean Suyeux), appeared first in Psychologies 5 (nov. 1983). and was
collected in Us Annees d'hi'ller 1980-1985 (Paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986), pp. 193-200.
1 Robert Castel, Le PJychanaIysme (Paris: Maspero, 1972).
Translated by Charles Dudas
PART II
From Schizo Bypasses to
Postmodern Impasses
7
The First Positive Task of
Schizoanalysis
With Gilles Deleuze
The negative or destructive task of schizoanalysis is in no way separable
from its positive tasks - all these tasks are necessarily undertaken at the
same time. The flrst positive task consists of discovering in a subject the
nature, the formation, of the functioning of his desiring-machines, inde-
pendently of any intefpretations. What are your desiring-machines, what
do you put into these machines, what is the output, how does it work,
what are your nonhuman sexes? The schizo analyst is a mechanic, and
schizo analysis is solely functional. In this respect it cannot remain at the
level of a still interpretative examination - interpretative from the point
of view of the unconscious - of the social machines in which the subject
is caught as a cog or as a user; nor of the technical machines that are his
prized possession, or that he perfects or even produces through handi-
work; nor of the subject's use of his machines in his dreams and his
fantasies. These machines are still too representative, and represent units
that are too large - even the perverted machines of the sadist or the
masochist, even the influencing machines ofthe paranoiac. We have seen
in general that the pseudo-analyses of the "object" were really the lowest
level of analytic activity, even and especially when they claim to double
the real object with an imaginary object; and better a how-to-interpret-
your-dreams book than a psychoanalysis of the market place.
The consideration of all these machines, however, whether they be
real, symbolic, or imaginary, must indeed intervene in a specific way -
but as functional indices to point us in the direction of the desiring-ma-
chines, to which these indices are more or less close and affinal. The
desiring-machines in fact are only reached starting from a certain thre-
shold of dispersion that no longer permits either their imaginary identity
or their structural unity to subsist. (These instances still belong to the
order of interpretation, that is to say the order of the signified or the
signifier.) Partial objects are what make up the parts of the desiring-ma-
chines; partial objects defme the working machine or the working parts,
but in a state of dispersion such that one part is continually referring to a
78 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
part from an entirely different machine, like the red clover and the
bumble bee, the wasp and the orchid, the bicycle hom and the dead rat's
ass. Let's not rush to introduce a term that would be like a phallus
structuring the whole and personifying the parts, unifying and totalizing
everything. Everywhere there is libido as machine energy, and neither the
hom nor the bumble bee have the privilege of being a phallus: the phallus
intervenes only in the structural organization and the personal relations
deriving from it, where everyone, like the worker called to war, abandons
his machines and sets to fighting for a war trophy that is nothing but a
great absence, with one and the same penalty, one and the same ridicu-
lous wound for all - castration. This entire struggle for the phallus, this
poorly understood will to power, this anthropomorphic representation of
sex, this whole conception of sexuality that horrifies Lawrence precisely
because it is no more than a conception, because it is an idea that
"reason" imposes on the unconscious and introduces into the passional
sphere, and is not by any means a formation of this sphere - here is where
desire fmds itself trapped, specifically limited to human sex, unified and
identified in the molar constellation. But the desiring-machines live on
the contrary under the order of dispersion of the molecular elements.
And one fails to understand the nature and function of partial objects if
one does not see therein such elements, rather than parts of even a
fragmented whole. As Lawrence said, analysis does not have to do with
anything that resembles a concept or a person, "the so-called human
relations are not involved". I Analysis should deal solely (except in its
negative task) with the machinic arrangements grasped in the context of
their molecular dispersion.
Let us therefore return to the rule so clearly stated by Serge Leclaire,
even if he sees this only as a fiction instead of the real-desire [reel-desir]:
the elements or parts of the desiring-machines are recognized by their
mutual independence, such that nothing in the one depends or should
depend on something in the other. They must not be opposed determi-
nations of a same entity, nor the differentiations of a single being, such
as the masculine and the feminine in the human sex, but different
or really-distinct things [des reelkment-distincts), distinct "beings," as
found in the dispersion ofthe nonhuman sex (the clover and the bee). As
long as schizo analysis has not arrived at these disparate elements, it has
not yet discovered the partial objects as the ultimate elements of the
unconscious. It is in this sense that Leclaire used the term "erogenous
body" not to designate a fragmented organism, but an emission of
preindividual and prepersonal singularities, a pure dispersed and an-
archic multiplicity, without unity or totality, and whose elements are
welded, pasted together by the real distinction or the very absence of a
link. Such is the case in the schizoid sequences of Beckett: stones,
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 79
pockets, mouth; a shoe, a pipe bowl, a small limp bundle that is un-
defined, a cover for a bicycle bell, half a crutch (if one indefinitely runs
up against the same set of pure singularities, one can feel confident that
he has drawn near the singularity of the subject's desire).2 To be sure,
one can always establish or re-establish some sort of link between these
elements: organic links between organs or fragments or organs that
eventually form part of the multiplicity; psychological and axiological
links - the good, the bad - that finally refer to the persons or to the scenes
from which these elements are borrowed; structural links between the
ideas or the concepts apt to correspond to them. But it is not in this
respect that the partial objects are elements of the unconscious, and we
cannot even go along with the image of the partial objects that their
inventor, Melanie Klein, proposes. This is because, whether organs or
fragments of organs, the partial objects do not refer in the least to an
organism that would function phantasmatically as a lost unity or a totality
to come. Their dispersion has nothing to do with a lack, and constitutes
their mode or presence in-the multiplicity they form without unification
or totalization. With every structure dislodged, every memory abolished,
every organism set aside, every link undone, they function as raw partial
objects, dispersed working parts of a machine that is itself dispersed. In
short, partial objects are the molecular functions of the unconscious. That is
why, when we insisted earlier on the difference between desiring-ma-
chines and all the figures of molar machines, we were fully aware that
they were both contained in, and did not exist without, one another, but
we had to stress the difference in regime and in scale between these two
machinic species.
It is true that one might instead wonder how these conditions of
dispersion, of real distinction, and of the absence of a link permit any
machinic regime to exist - how the partial objects thus defmed are able
to form machines and arrangements of machines. The answer lies in the
passive nature of the syntheses, or - what amounts to the same thing - in
the indirect nature of the interactions under consideration. If it is true
that every partial object emits a flow, it is also the case that this flow is
associated with another partial object and defines the other's potential
field of presence, which is itself multiple (a multiplicity of anuses for the
flows of shit). The synthesis of connection of the partial objects is
indirect, since one of the partial objects, in each point of its presence
within the field, always breaks the flow that another object emits or
produces relatively, itself ready to emit a flow that other partial ob-
jects will break. The flows are two-headed, so to speak, and it is by means
of these flows that every productive connection is made, such as we
have tried to account for with the notion of flow-schizz or break-
flow. So that the true activities of the unconscious, causing to flow and
80 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
breaking flows, consist of the passive synthesis itself insofar as it en-
sures the relative coexistence and displacement ofthe two different func-
tions.
Now let us assume that the respective flows associated with two panial
objects at least partially overlap: their production remains distinct in
relation to the objects x and y that emft them, but not the fields of
presence in relation to the objects a and b that inhabit and interrupt
them, such that the partial a and the panial b become in this regard
indiscernible (thUS the mouth and the anus, the mouth-anus of the
anorexic). And they are not indiscernible solely in the mixed region,
since one can always assume that, having exchanged their function within
this region, they cannot be further distinguished by exclusion there where
the two flows no longer overlap: one then finds oneself before a new
passive synthesis where a and b are in a paradoxical relationship of
included disjunction. Finally there remains the possibility, not of an
overlapping of the flows, but of a permutation of the objects that emit
them: one discovers fringes of interference on the edge 'of each field of
presence, fringes that testify to the remainder of a flow in the other, and
form residual conjunctive syntheses guiding the passage or the heanfelt
becoming from the one to the other. A permutation involving 2, 3, n
organs; deformable abstract polygons that make game of the figurative
Oedipal triangle, and never cease to undo it. Through binarity, overlap-
ping, or permutation, all these indirect passive syntheses are one and the
same engineering of desire. But who will be able to describe the desiring-
machines of each subject, what analysis will be exacting enough for this?
Mozart's desiring-machine? "Raise your ass to your mouth, ab, my
ass burns like fire, but what can be the meaning of that? Perhaps a turd
wants to come out. Yes, yes, turd, I know you, I see you, I feel you.
What is this - is such a thing possible?"3
These syntheses necessarily imply the position of a body without
organs. This is due to the fact that the body without organs is in no way
the contrary of the organs-partial objects. It is itself produced in the first
passive synthesis of connection, as that which is going to neutralize - or
on the contrary put into motion - the two activities, the two heads of
desire. For as we have seen, it can be produced as the amorphous fluid of
antiproduction, just as it can be produced as the suppon that appropri-
ates for itself the flow production. It can as well repel the organs-objects
as attract them, and appropriate them for itself. But in repulsion as in
attraction, the body without organs is not in opposition to these organ-
objects; it merely ensures its own opposition, and their opposition, with
regard to an organism. The body without organs and the organs-panial
objects are opposed conjointly to the organism. The body without organs
is in fact produced as a whole, but a whole alongside the pans - a whole
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 81
that does not unify or totalize them, but that is added to them like a new,
really distinct part.
When it repels the organs, as in the mounting of the paranoiac ma-
chine, the body without organs marks the external limit of the pure
multiplicity formed by these organs themselves insofar as they constitute
a nonorganic and nonorganized multiplicity. And when it attracts them
and fits itself over them, in the process of a miraculating fetishistic
machine, it still does not totalize them, unify them in the manner of an
organism: the organs-partial objects cling (0 the body without organs,
and enter into the new syntheses of included disjunction and nomadic
conjunction, of overlapping and permutation, on this body - syntheses
that continue to repudiate the organism and its organization. Desire
indeed passes through the body, and through the organs, but not through
the organism. That is why the partial objects are not the expression of a
fragmented, shattered organism, which would presuppose a destroyed
totality or the freed parts of a whole; nor is the body without organs the
expression of a "de-differentiated" [di-dif!erenciel organism stuck back
together that would surmount its parts. The organs-partial objects and
the body without organs are at bottom one and the same thing, one and
the same multiplicity that must be conceived as such by schizoanalysis.
Partial objects are the direct powers of the body without organs, and the body
without organs, the raw material of the partial objects.
4
The body without
organs is the matter that always fills space to given degrees of intensity,
and the partial objects are these degrees, these intensive parts that
produce the real in space starting from matter as intensity = o. The body
without organs is the immanent substance, in the most Spinozist sense of
the word; and the partial objects are like its ultimate attributes, which
belong to it precisely insofar as they are really distinct and cannot on this
account exclude or oppose one another. The partial objects and the body
without organs are the two material elements of the schizophrenic desir-
ing-machines: the one as the immobile motor, the others as the working
parts; the one as the giant molecule, the others as the micromolecules -
the two together in a relationship of continuity from one end to the other
of the molecular chain of desire.
The chain is like the apparatus of transmission or of reproduction in
the desiring-machine. Insofar as it brings together - without unifying or
uniting them the body without organs and the partial objects, the
desiring-machine is inseparable both from the distribution of the partial
objects on the body without organs, and from the leveling effect exerted
on the partial objects by the body without organs, which results in
appropriation. The chain also implies another type of synthesis than the
flows: it is no longer the lines of connection that traverse the productive
parts of the machine, but an entire network of disjunction on the
82 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
recording surface of the body without organs. And we have doubtless
been able to present things in a logical order where the disjunctive
synthesis of recording seemed to follow after the connective synthesis of
production, with a part of the energy of production (Libido) being
converted into a recording energy (Numen). But in fact, from the stand-
point of the machine itself, there is no succession that ensures the strict
coexistence of the chains and the flows, as well as of the body without
organs and the partial objects. The conversion ofa portion of the energy
does not occur at a given moment, but is a preliminary and constant
condition of the system. The chain is the network of included disjunc-
tions on the body without organs, inasmuch as these disjunctions resect
the productive connections; the chain causes them to pass over to the
body without organs itself, thereby channeling or "codifying" the flows.
However, the whole question is in knowing whether one can speak of a
code at the level of this molecular chain of desire. We have seen that a
code implied two things - one or the other, or the two together: on the
one hand, the specific determination of the full body as a territoriality of
support; on the other hand, the erection of a despotic signifier on which
the entire chain depends. In this regard, in vain is the axiomatic in
profound opposition to codes; since it works on the decoded flows, it
cannot itself proceed except by effecting reterritorializations and by
reviving the signifying unity. The very notions of code and axiomatic
therefore seem to be valid only for the molar aggregates, where the
signifying chain forms a given determinate configuration on a support
that is itself specifically determined, and ip. terms of a detached signifier.
These conditions are not fulfIlled without exclusions forming and ap-
pearing in the disjunctive network - at the same time as the connective
lines take on a global and specific meaning.
But it is another case altogether with the properly molecular chain:
insofar as the body without organs is a nonspecific and nonspecified
support that marks the molecular limit of the molar aggregates, the chain
no longer has any other function than that of deterritorialiiing the flows
and causing them to pass through the signifying wall, thereby undoing
the codes. The function of the chain is no longer that of coding the flows
on a full body of the earth, the despot, or capital, but on the contrary that
of decoding them on the full body without organs. It is a chain of escape,
and no longer a code. The signifying chain has become a chain of
decoding and deterritorialization, which must be apprehended - and can
only be apprehended - as the reverse of the codes and the territorialities.
This molecular chain is still signifying because it is composed of signs of
desire; but these signs are no longer signifying, given the fact that they
are under the order of the included disjunctions where everything is
possible. These signs are points whose nature is a matter of indifference,
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 83
abstract machinic figures that play freely on the body without organs and
as yet form no structured configuration - or rather, they form one no
longer. As Jacques Monod says, we must conceive of a machine that is
such by its functional properties but not by its structure, "'where nothing
but the play of blind combinations can be discerned".5 It is precisely the
ambiguity of what the biologists call a genetic code that enables us to
understand this kind of situation: for if the corresponding chain effective-
ly forms codes, inasmuch as it folds into exclusive molar configurations,
it undoes the code by unfolding along a molecular fibre that includes all
the possible figures. Similarly in Lacan, the symbolic organization of the
structure, with its exclusions that come from the function of the signifier,
has as its reverse side the real inorganization of desire.
It would seem that the genetic code points to a genic decoding: one
need only grasp the decoding and deterritorialization functions in their
own positivity, inasmuch as they imply a particular chain state that is
metastable and distinct both from any axiomatic and from any code. The
molecular chain is the form in which the genic unconscious, always
remaining subject, reproduces itself. And as we have seen, that is the
primary inspiration of psychoanalysis: it does not add a code to all those
that are already known. The signifying chain of the unconscious, Numen,
is not used to discover or decipher codes of desire, but to cause absolute-
ly decoded flows of desire, Libido, to circulate, and to discover in desire
that which scrambles all the codes and undoes all the territorialities. It is
true that Oedipus will restore psychoanalysis to the status of a simple
code, with the familial territoriality and the signifier of castration. Worse
yet, it will happen that psychoanalysis itself wants to act as an axiomatic,
which is the famous turning point where it no longer even relates to the
familial scene, but solely to the psychoanalytic scene that supposedly
answers for its own truth, and to the psychoanalytic operation that
supposedly answers for its own success - the couch as an axiomatized
earth, the axiomatic of the "cure" as a successful castration! But by
recoding or axiomatizing the flows of desire in this way, psychoanalysis
makes a molar use of the signifying chain that results in a misappreciation
of all the syntheses of the unconscious.
The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of
horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the
model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to
death. Zero intensity. The death model appears when the body without
organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no
teeth - to the point of self-mutilation, to the point of suicide. Yet there is
no real opposition between the body without organs and the organs as
partial objects; the only real opposition is to the molar organism that is
their common enemy. In the desiring-machine, one sees the same
84 From Schizo Bypasses to Poslmodern Impasses
catatonic inspired by the immobile motor that forces him to put aside his
organs, to immobilize them, to silence them, but also, impelled by the
working parts that work in an autonomous or stereotyped to
reactivate the organs, to reanimate them with local movements. It is a
Question of different parts of the machine, different and coexisting,
different in their very coexistence. Hence it is absurd to speak of a death
desire that would presumably be in Qualitative opposition to the life
desires. Death is not desired, there is only death that desires, by virtue of
the body without organs or the immobile motor, and there is also life that
desires, by virtue of the working organs. There we do not have two
desires but two parts, two kinds of desiring-machine parts, in the disper-
sion of the machine itself. And yet the problem persists: how can all that
function together? For it is not yet a functioning, but solely the (non-
structural) condition of a molecular functioning. The functioning ap-
pears when the motor, under the preceding conditions - i.e. without
ceasing to be immobile and without forming an organism - attracts the
organs to the body without organs, and appropriates them for itself in the
apparent objective movement. Repulsion is the condition of the ma-
chine's functioning, but attraction is the functioning itself. That the
functioning depends on repulsion is clear to us, inasmuch as it all works
only by breaking down. One is then able to say what this running or this
functioning consists of: in the cycle of the desiring-machine it is a matter
of constantly translating, constantly converting the death model into
something else altogether, which is the experience of death. Converting
the death that rises from within the body without organs) into the
death that comes from without (on the body without organs).
But it seems that things are becoming very obscure, for what is this
distinction between the experience of death and the model of death?
Here again, is it a death desire? A being-for-death? Or rather an invest-
ment of death, even if speculative? None of the above. The experience of
death is the most common of occurrences in the unconscious, precisely
because it occurs in life and for life, in every passage or becoming, in
every intensity as passage or becoming. It is in the very nature of every
intensity to invest within itself the zero intensity starting from which it is
produced, in one moment, as that which grows or diminishes according
to an infinity of degrees (as Pierre Klossowski noted, "an afflux is
necessary merely to signify the absence of intensity"). We have attempted
to show in this respect how the relations of attraction and repulsion
produced such states, sensations, and emotions, which imply a new
energetic conversion and form the third kind of synthesis, the synthesis
of conjunction. One might say that the unconscious as a real subject has
scattered an apparent residual and nomadic subject around the entire
compass of its cycle, a subject that passes by way of all the be comings
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 85
corresponding to the included disjunctions: the last part of the desiring-
machine, the adjacent part. These intense becomings and feelings, these
intensive emotions, feed deliriums and hallucinations. But in themselves,
these intensive emotions are closest to the matter whose zero degree they
invest in itself. They control the unconscious experience of death, insofar
as death is what is felt in every feeling, what never ceases and never finishes
happening in every becoming - in the becoming-another-sex, the becom-
ing-god, the becoming-a-face, etc., forming zones of intensity on the
body without organs. Every intensity controls within its own life the
experience of death, and envelops it. And it is doubtless the case that
every intensity is extinguished at the end, that every becoming itself
becomes a becoming-death! Death, then, does actually happen. Maurice
Blanchot distinguishes this twofold nature clearly, these two irreducible
aspects of death; the one, accQrding to which the apparent subject never
ceases to live and travel as a One - "one never stops and never has done
with dying"; and the other, according to which this same subject, fixed as
I, actually dies - which is to say it fmally ceases to die since it ends
up dying, in the reality of a last instant that fIxes it in this way as an I, all
tJ:te while undoing the intensity, carrying it back to the zero that envelops
it.
6
From one aspect to the other, there is not at all a personal deepening,
but something quite different: there is a return from the experience of
death to the model of death, in the cycle of the desiring-machines. The
cycle is closed. For a new departure, since this I is another? The experi-
ence of death must have given us exactly enough broadened experience,
in order to live and know that the desiring-machines do not die. And that
the subject as an adjacent part is always a "one" who conducts the
experience, not an I who receives the model. For the model itself is not
the I either, but the body without organs. And I does not rejoin the model
without the model starting out again in the direction of another experi-
ence. Always going from the model to the experience, and starting out
again, returning from the model to the experience, is what schizophreniz-
ing death amounts to, the exercise of the desiring-machines (which is
their very secret, well understood by the terrifying authors). The ma-
chines tell us this, and make us live it, feel it, deeper than delirium and
further than hallucination; yes, the return to repulsion will condition
other attractions, other functionings, the setting in motion of other
working parts on the body without organs, the putting to work of other
adjacent parts on the periphery that have as much a right to say One as
we ourselves do. "Let him die in his leaping through unheard-of and
unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin on
the horizons where the other collapsed"!7 The Eternal Return as experi-
ence, and as the deterritorialized circuit of all the cycles of desire.
86 From Schizo Bypasses CO Postmodern Impasses
How odd the psychoanalytic venture is. Psychoanalysis ought to be
song of life, or else be worth nothing at all. It ought, practically, to teach
us to sing life. And see how the most defeated, sad song of death
emanates from it: eiapopeia. From the start, and because of his stubborn
dualism of the drives, Freud never stopped trying to limit the discovery
of a subjective or vital essence of desire as libido. But when the dualism
passed into a death instinct against Eros, this was no longer a simple
limitation, it was a liquidation of the libido. Reich did not go wrong here,
and was perhaps the only one to maintain that the product of analysis
should be a free and joyous person, a carrier of the life flows, capable of
carrying them all the way into the desert and decoding them - even if this
idea necessarily took on the appearance of a crazy idea, given what had
become of analysis. He demonstrated that Freud, no less than Jung and
Adler, had repudiated the sexual position: the fixing of the death instinct
in fact deprives sexuality of its generative role on at least one essential
point, which is the genesis of anxiety, since this genesis becomes the
autonomous cause of sexual repression instead of its result; it follows that
sexuality as desire no longer animates a social critique of civilization, but
that civilization on the contrary finds itself sanctified as the sole agency
capable of opposing the death desire. And how does it do this? By in
principle turning death against death, by making this turned-back death
[Ia mort retournee] into a force of desire, by putting it in the service of a
pseudo-life through an entire culture of guilt feeling.
There is no need to tell all over how psychoanalysis culminates in a
theory of culture that takes up again the age-old task of the ascetic ideal,
Nirvana, the cultural extract, judging life, belittling life, measuring life
against death, and only retaining from life what the death of death wants
very much to leave us with - a sublime resignation. As Reich says, when
psychoanalysis began to speak of Eros, the whole world breathed a sigh
of relief: one knew what this meant, and that everything was going to
unfold within a mortified life, since Thanatos was now the partner of
Eros, for worse but also for better.
8
Psychoanalysis becomes the training
ground of a new kind of priest, the director of bad conscience: bad
conscience has made us sick, but that is what will cure us! Freud did not
hide what was really at issue with the introduction of the death instinct:
it is not a question of any fact whatever, but merely of a principle, a
question of principle. The death instinct is pure silence, pure transcend-
ence, not givable and not given in experience. This very point is remark-
able: it is because death, according to Freud, has neither a model nor an
experience, that he makes of it a transcendent principle.
9
So that the
psychoanalysts who refused the death instinct did so for the same reasons
as those who accepted it: some said that there was no death instinct since
there was no model or experience in the unconscious; others, that there
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 87
was a death instinct precisely because there was no model or experience.
We say, to the contrary, that there is no death instinct because there is
both the model and the experience of death in the unconscious. Death
then is a part of the desiring-machine, a part that must itself be judged,
evaluated in the functioning of the machine and the system of its en-
ergetic conversions, and not as an abstract principle.
If Freud needs death as a principle, this is by virtue of the requirements
of the dualism that maintains a qualitative opposition between the drives
(you will not escape the conflict): once the dualism of the sexual drives
and the ego drives has only a topological scope, the qualitative or dy-
namic dualism passes between Eros and Thanatos. But the. same enter-
prise is continued and reinforced - eliminating the machinic element of
desire, the desiring-machines. It is a matter of eliminating the libido,
insofar as it implies the possibility of energetic conversions in the ma-
chine (Libido-Numen-Voiuptas).1t is a matter of imposing the idea of an
energetic duality rendering the machinic transformations impossible,
with everything obliged to pass by way of an indifferent neutral energy,
that energy emanating from Oedipus and capable of being added to
either of the two irreducible forms - neutralizing, mortifying life.
lo
The
purpose of the topological and dynamic dualities is to thrust aside the
point of view of functional multiplicity that alone is economic. (Szondi
situates the problem clearly: why two kinds of drives qualified as molar,
functioning mysteriously, which is to say oedipally, rather than n genes of
drives - eight molecular genes, for example - functioning machinically?)
If one looks in this direction for the ultimate reason why Freud erects
a transcendent death instinct as a principle, the reason will be found in
Freud's practice itself. For if the principle has nothing to do with the
facts, it has a lot to do with the psychoanalyst's conception of psychoana-
lytic practice, a conception the psychoanalyst wishes to impose. Freud
made the most profound discovery of the abstract subjective essence of
desire - Libido. But since he realienated this essence, reinvesting it in a
subjective system of representation of the ego, and since he recoded this
essence on the residual territoriality of Oedipus and under the despotic
signifier of castration, he could no longer conceive the essence of life
except in a form turned back against itself, in the form of death itself.
And this neutralization, this turning against life, is also the last way in
which a depressive and exhausted libido can go on surviving, and dream
that it is surviving: "The ascetic ideal is an artifice for the preservation of
life even when he wounds himself, this master of destruction, of
self-destructing - the very wound itself compels him to live ."11 It is
Oedipus, the marshy earth, that gives off a powerful odor of decay and
death; and it is castration, the pious ascetic wound, the signifier, that
makes of this death a conservatory for the Oedipal life. Desire is in itself
88 From Schizo Bypasses to Poslmodern Impasses
not a desire to love, but a force to love, a virtue that gives and produces,
that engineers. (For how could what is in life still desire life? Who would
want to call that a desire?) But desire must tum back against itself in the
name of a horrible Ananke, the Ananke of the weak and the depressed,
the contagious neurotic Ananke; desire must produce its shadow or its
monkey, and find a strange artificial force for vegetating in the void, at
the heart of its own lack. For better days to come? It must - but who talks
in this way? what abjectness - become a desire to be loved, and worse, a
sniveling desire to have been loved, a desire that is reborn of its own
frustration: no, daddy-mommy didn't love me enough. Sick desire stret-
ches out on the couch, an artificial swamp, a linle earth, a little mother.
"Look at you, stumbling and staggering with no use in your
legs. And it's nothing but your wanting to be loved which does it. A
maudlin crying to be loved, which makes your knees go all ricky" 12 Just
as there are two stomachs for the ruminant, there must also exist two
abortions, two castrations for sick desire: once in the family, in the
familial scene, with the knitting mother; another tipte in an asepticized
clinic, in the psychoanalytic scene, with specialist artists who know how
to handle the death instinct and "bring off" castration, "bring off"
frustration.
Is this really the right way to bring on better days? And aren't all the
destructions performed by schizoanalysis worth more than this psycho-
analytic conservatory, aren't they more a part of an affirmative task? "Lie
down, then, on the soft couch which the analyst provides and try to think
up something different if you realize that he is not a god but a human
being like yourself, with worries, defects, ambitions, frailties, that he is
not the repository of an all-encompassing wisdom [= code] but a wan-
derer, along the [deterritorialized] path, perhaps you will cease pouring
it out like a sewer, however melodious it may sound to your ears, and rise
up on your own two legs and sing with your own God-given voice
[Numen]. To confess, to whine, to complain, to commiserate, always
demands a toll. To sing it doesn't cost you a penny. Not only does it cost
nothing - you actually enrich others (instead of infecting them). The
phantasmal world is the world which has not been fully conquered over.
It is the world of the past, never of the future. To move forward clinging
to the past is like dragging a ball and chain. We are all guilty of crime,
the great crime of not living life to the full".!3 You weren't born Oedipus,
you caused it to grow in yourself; and you aim to get out of it through
fantasy, through castration, but this in tum you have caused to grow in
Oedipus - namely, in yourself: the horrible circle. Shit on your whole
mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theatre. What does schizo analysis
ask? Nothing more than a bit of a relation to the outside, a little real reality.
And we claim the right to a radical laxity, a radical incompetence - the
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 89
right to enter the analyst's office and say it smells bad there. It reeks of
the great death and the little ego.
Freud himself indeed spoke of the link between his "discovery" of the
death instinct and World War I, which remains the model of capitalist
war. More generally, the death instinct celebrates the wedding of psycho-
analysis and capitalism; their engagement had been full of hesitation.
What we have tried to show a propos of capitalism is how it inherited
much from a transcendent death-carrying agency, the despotic signifier,
but also how it brought about this agency's effusion in the full im-
manence of its own system: the full body, having become that of capital-
money, suppresses the distinction between production and
anti-production; everywhere it mixes antiproduction with the productive
forces in the immanent reproduction of its own always widened limits
(the axiomatic). The death enterprise is one of the principal and specific
forms of the absorption of surplus value in capitalism. It is this itinerary
that psychoanalysis rediscovers and retraces with the death instinct: the
death instinct is now only pure silence in its transcendent distinction
from life, but it effuses all the more, throughout all the immanent
combinations it forms with this same life. Absorbed, diffuse, immanent
death is the condition formed by the signifier in capitalism, the empty
locus that is everywhere displaced in order to block the schizophrenic
escapes and place restraints on the flights.
The only modern myth is the myth of zombies - mortified schizos,
good for work, brought back to reason. In this sense the primitive and the
barbarian, with their ways of coding death, are children in comparison to
modern man and his axiomatic (so many unemployed are needed, so
many deaths, the Algerian War doesn't kill more people than weekend
automobile accidents, planned death in Bengal, etc.). Modem man
"raves to a far greater extent. His delirium is a switchboard with thirteen
telephones. He gives his orders to the world. He doesn't care for the
ladies. He is brave, too. He is decorated like crazy. In man's game of
chance the death instinct, the silent instinct is decidedly well placed,
perhaps next to egotism. It takes the place of zero in roulette. The house
always wins. So too does death. The law of large numbers works for
death". 14 It is now or never that we must take up a problem we had left
hanging. Once it is said that capitalism works on the basis of decoded
flows as such, how is it that it is infinitely further removed from desiring-
production than were the primitive or even the barbarian systems, which
nonetheless code and overcode the flows? Once it is said that desiring-
production is itself a decoded and deterritorialized production, how do
we explain that capitalism, with its axiomatic, its statistics, performs an
infinitely vaster repression of this production than do the preceding
regimes, which nonetheless did not lack the necessary repressive means?
90 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
We have seen that the molar statistical aggregates of social production
were in a variable relationship of affinity with the molecular formations
of desiring-production. What must be explained is that the capitalist
aggregate is the least affinal, at the very moment it decodes and deterri-
torializcs with all its might.
The answer is the death instinct, if we call instinct in general the
conditions of life that are historically and socially determined by the
relations of production and antiproduction in a system. We know that
molar social production and molecular desiring-production must be
evaluated both from the viewpoint of their identity in nature and from the
viewpoint of their difference in regime. But it could be that these two
aspects, nature and regime, are in a sense potential and are actuaHzed
only in inverse proportion. Which means that where the regimes are the
closest, the identity in nature is on the contrary at its minimum; and
where the identity in nature appears to be at its maximum, the regimes
differ to the highest degree. If we examine the primitive or the barbarian
constellations, we see that the SUbjective essence of desire as production
is referred to large objectivities, to the territorial or the despotic body,
which act as natural or divine preconditions that thus ensure the coding
or the overcoding of the flows of desire by introducing them into systems
of representation that are themselves objective. Hence it can be said that
the identity in nature between the two productions is completely hidden
there: as much by the difference between the objective socius and the
subjective full body of desiring-production, as by the difference between
the qualified codes and overcodings of social production and the chains
of decoding or of de territorialization belonging to desiring- production,
and by the entire repressive apparatus represented in the savage prohibi-
tions, the barbarian law, and the rights of antiproduction. And yet the
difference in regime, far from being accentuated and deepened, is on the
contrary reduced to a minimum, because desiring-production as an
absolute limit remains an exterior limit, or else stays unoccupied as an
internalized and displaced limit, with the result that the machines of
desire operate on this side of their limit within the framework of the
socius and its codes. That is why the primitive codes and even the
despotic overcodings testify to a polyvocity that functionally draws them
nearer to a chain of decoding of desire: the parts of the desiring-machine
function in the very workings of the social machine; the flows of desire
enter and exit through the codes that continue, however, to inform the
model and experience of death that are elaborated in the unity of the
sociodesiring-appararus. And it is even less a question of the death
instinct to the extent that the model and the experience are better coded
in a circuit that never stops grafting the desiring-machines onto the social
machine and implanting the social machine in the desiring-machines.
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 91
Death comes all the more from without as it is coded from within. This
is especially true of the system of cruelty, where death is inscribed in the
primitive mechanism of surplus value as well as in the movement of the
finite blocks of debt. But even in the system of despotic terror, where
debt becomes infinite and where death experiences an elevation that
tends to make of it a latent instinct, there nonetheless subsists a model in
the overcoding law, and an experience for the overcoded subjects, at the
same time as antiproduction remains separate as the share owing to the
overlord.
Things are very different in capitalism. Precisely because the flows of
capital are decoded and deterritorialized flows; precisely because the
subjective essence of production is revealed in capitalism; precisely be-
cause the limit becomes internal to capitalism, which continually repro-
duces it, and also continually occupies it as an internalized and displaced
limit; precisely for these reasons, the identity in nature must appear for
itself between social production and desiring-production. But in its tum,
this identity in nature, far from favoring an affinity in regime between the
two modes of production, increases the difference in regime in a catastro-
phic fashion, and assembles an apparatus of repression the mere idea of
which neither savagery nor barbarism could provide us. This is because,
on the basis of a general collapse of the large objectivities, the decoded
and deterritorialized flows of capitalism are not recaptured or co-opted,
but directly apprehended in a codeless axiomatic that consigns them to
the universe of subjective representation. Now this universe has as its
function the splitting of the subjective essence (the identity in nature)
into two functions, that of abstract labor alienated in private property
that reproduces the ever wider interior limits, and that of abstract desire
alienated in the privatized family that displaces the ever narrower inter-
nalized limits. The double alienation - labor-desire - is constantly in-
creasing and deepening the difference in regime at the heart of the
identity in nature. At the same time that death is decoded, it loses its
relationship with a model and an experience, and becomes an instinct;
that is, it effuses in the immanent system where each act of production is
inextricably linked to the process of antiproduction as capital. There
where the codes are undone, the death instinct lays hold of the repressive
apparatus and begins to direct the circulation of the libido. A mortuary
axiomatic. One might then believe in liberated desires, but ones that, like
cadavers, feed on images. Death is not desired, but what is desired is
dead, already dead: images. Everything labors in death, everything
wishes for death. In truth, capitalism has nothing to co-opt; or rather, its
powers of co-option coexist more often than not with what is to be
co-opted, and even anticipate it. (How many revolutionary groups as
such are already in place for a co-option that will be carried out only in
92 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
the future, and form an apparatus for the absorption of a surplus value
not even produced yet - which gives them precisely an apparent revol-
utionary position.) In a world such as this, there is no living desire that
could not of itself cause the system to explode, or that would not make
the system dissolve at one end where everything would end up following
behind and being swallowed up - a question of regime.
Here are the desiring-machines, with their three parts: the working
parts, the immobile motor, the adjacent parts; their three forms of
energy: Ubido, Numen, and Voluptas; and their three syntheses: the
connective syntheses of partial objects and flows, the disjunctive syn-
theses of singularities and chains, and the conjunctive syntheses of inten-
sities and becomings. The schizoanalyst is not an interpreter, even less a
theatre director; he is a mechanic, a micromechanic. There are no
excavations to be undertaken, no archaeology, no statues in the uncon-
scious: there are only stones to be sucked, a la Beckett, and other
machinic elements belonging to deterritorialized constellations. The task
of schizoanalysis is that oflearning what a subject's desiring-machines are,
how they work, with what syntheses, what bursts of energy in the ma-
chines, what constituent misfires, with what flows, what chains, and what
becomings in each case. Moreover, this positive task cannot be separated
from indispensable destructions, the destruction of the molar aggregates,
the structures and representations that prevent the machine from func-
tioning. It is not easy to rediscover the molecules even the giant
molecule - their paths, their zones of presence, and their own syntheses,
amid the large accumulations that fill the preconscious, and that delegate
their representatives in the unconscious itself, thereby immobilizing the
machines, silencing them, trapping them, sabotaging them, cornering
them, holding them fast. In the unconscious it is not the lines of pressure that
matter, but on the contrary the lines of escape. The unconscious does not
apply pressure to consciousness; rather, consciousness applies pressure
and straitjackets the unconscious, to prevent its escape. As to the uncon-
scious, it is like the Platonic opposite whose opposite draws near: it flees
or it perishes. What we have tried to show from the outset is how the
unconscious productions and formations were not merely repelled by an
agency of psychic repression that would enter into compromises with
them, but actually covered over by antiformations that disfigure the
unconscious in itself, and impose on it causations, comprehensions, and
expressions that no longer have anything to do with its real functioning:
thus all the statues, the Oedipal images, the phantasmal mise en scene, the
Symbolic of castration, the effusion of the death instinct, the perverse
reterritorializations. So that one can never, as in an interpretation, read
the repressed through and in repression, since the latter is constantly
inducing a false image of the thing it represses: illegitimate and tran-
The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis 93
scendent uses of the syntheses according to which the unconscious can
no longer operate in accordance with its own constituent machines, but
merely "represent" what a repressive apparatus gives it to represent. It is
the very form of interpretation that shows itself to be incapable of
attaining the unconscious, since it gives rise to the inevitable illusions
(including the structure and the signifier) by means of which the con-
scious makes of the unconscious an image consonant with its wishes: we
are still pious, psychoanalysis remains in the precritical stage.
Doubtless these illusions would not take hold if they did not benefit
from a coincidence and a support in the unconscious itself that ensures
the "hold" We have seen what this support was: primal repression, as
exerted by the body without organs at the moment of repulsion, at the
heart of molecular desiring-production. Without this primal repression,
a psychic regression in the proper sense of the word could not be
delegated in the unconscious by the molar forces and thus crush desiring-
production. Regression properly speaking profits from an occasion with-
out which it could not interfere in the machinery of In contrast
to psychoanalysis, which itselffalls into the trap while causing the uncon-
scious to fall into its trap, schizoanalysis follows the lines of escape and
the machinic indices all the way to the desiring-machines. If the essential
aspect of the destructive task is to undo the Oedipal trap of regression
properly speaking, and all its dependencies, each time in a way adapted
to the "case" in question, the essential aspect of the first positive task is
to ensure the machinic conversion of primal repression, there too in an
adapted variable manner. Which is to say: undoing the blockage or the
coincidence on which the repression properly speaking relies; transfor-
ming the apparent opposition of repulsion (the body without organs/the
machines-partial objects) into a condition of real functioning; ensuring
this functioning in the forms of attraction and production of intensities;
thereafter integrating the failures in the attractive functioning, as well as
enveloping the zero degree in the intensities produced; and thereby
causing the desiring-machines to start up again. Such is the delicate and
focal point that fills the function of transference in schizoanalysis
dispersing, schizophrenizing the perverse transference of psychoanalysis.
Notes
This selection is taken from the English translation of Deleuze and Guanari's Anti-Oedipus:
Capitah"sm and Schizophrenia (New York: The Viking Press, 1977), pp" 322-39.
I D.H. Lawrence, "Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious", in Psychoanalysis and tJu
Unconscious and Fantasia of tJu Unconscious (New York: Viking Press, 1969), p. 30.
2 Serge Leclaire, "La realite du desir", in Sexualire humaine (Paris: Aubier, 1970), p. 245.
And Seminairt Vincennes, 1969, pp. 31-4 (the opposition between the "erogenous
body" and the organism).
94 From Schizo Bypasses to Posrmodern Impasses
3 From a letter by Mozart, cited by Marcel More, I.e Dieu Mozart el le monde des oiseau"
(Paris: Gallimard, 1971), p. 124: "Having come of age, he found the means of
concealing his divine essence, by indulging in scatological amusements". More shows
convincingly how the scatological machine works underneath and against the Oedipal
"cage".
4 In his study on "Objet magique, sorcellerie et fetichisme" in Nouvelle revue de psychan-
alyse 2 (1970), Pierre Bonnafe clearly detnonstrates in this respect the inadequacy of a
notion like that of a fragmented body: "There is indeed a fragmenting of the body, but
not at all with a feeling of loss or degradation. Quite to the contrary, as much for the
holder as for the others, the body is fragmented by multiplication: the others no longer
have to do with a simple person, but with a man to the " + y + z pawer whose life has
been immeasurably increased, dispersed while being united with other natural
forces ... , since its existence no longer rests at the center of its person, but has hidden
itself in several far-off and impregnable locations" (pp. 166--67). Bonnafe recognizes in
the magic object the existence of the three desiring syntheses: the connective synthesis,
which combines the fragments of the person with those of animals or plants; the
included disjunctive synthesis, which records the man-animal composite; the conjunc-
tive synthesis, which implies a veritable migration ofthe remainder or residue.
5 Jacques Monod, Chana and Necessiry, trans. A. Wainhouse (New York: Knopf, 1971),
p.98.
6 On the "double death", see Maurice Blanchot, L 'Espace liniraire (Paris: Gallimard,
1955), pp. 104, 160.
7 Arthur Rimbaud,letter to Paul Demeny, 15 May, 1871.
8 W. Reich. The Function of the Orgasm. A correct interpretation - marked throughout by
idealism - of Freud's theory of culture and its catastrophic evolution concerning guilt
feeling, can be found in Paul Ricoeur: on death, and "the death of death", see De
I'inrerprerarion (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1965), pp. 299-303.
9 Freud, The Problem of Anxury, trans. Henry Alden Bunker (New York: Psychoanalytic
Quarterly Press, and Nonon, 1936); or Inhibitions, Symproms, and Anxury, trans. Alix
Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1936).
10 On the impossibility of immediate qualitative conversions, and the necessity for going
byway of neutral energy, see Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. Joan Riviere (New York:
Nonon, 1961). This impossibility, this necessity is no longer understandable, it seems
to us, if one agrees with Jean Laplanche that "the death drive has no energy of its own"
(Vu st mort en psychanalyse [Paris: Flammarion, 1970], p. 211). Therefore the death
drive could not enter into a veritable dualism, or would have to be confused with the
neutral energy itself, which Freud denies.
11 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, n. 13.
12 D.H. Lawrence, Aaron's Rod (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 101.
13 Henry Miller, Sexus (New York: Grove Press, 1965), pp. 429-30 (words in brackets
added). One would do well to consult the exercises of comic psychoanalysis in SIlXIIS.
14 L.-F. Celine, in L 'Herntl no. 3, p. 171.
15 Ibid.
Translated by Robert Hurley and Mark Seem
8
Regimes, Pathways, Subjects
Classical thought distanced the soul from matter and separated the
essence of the subject from the cogs of the body. Marxists later set up an
opposition between subjective superstructures and infrastructural rela-
tions of production. How then ought we talk about the production of
subjectivity today? the contents of subjectivity have become
increasingly dependent on 'a multitude of machinic systems. No area of
opinion, thought, images, affects or spectacle has eluded the invasive grip
of "computer-assisted" operations, such as databanks and telematics.
This leads one to wonder whether the very essence of the subject - that
infamous essence, so sought after over the centuries by Western philo-
sophy - is not threatened by contemporary subjectivity's new "machine
addiction" Its current result, a curious mix of enrichment and impover-
ishment, is plainly evident: apparent democratization of access to data
and modes of knowledge, coupled with a segregative exclusion from their
means of development; a multiplication of anthropological approaches, a
planetary intermixing of cultures, paradoxically accompanied by a rising
tide of particularisms, racisms and nationalisms; and a vast expansion in
the fields of technoscientific and aesthetic investigation, taking place in a
general atmosphere of gloom and disenchantment. Rather than joining
the fashionable crusades against the misdeeds of modernism, or pre-
aching a rehabilitation of worn-out transcendent values, or indulging in
the disillusioned indulgences of postmodernism, we might instead try to
find a way out of the dilemma of having to choose between unyielding
refusal or cynical acceptance of this situation.
The fact that machines are capable of articulating statements and
registering states of fact in as little as a nanosecond, and soon in a
picosecond,
l
does not in itself make them diabolical powers that threaten
to dominate human beings. People have little reason to tum away from
machines; which are nothing other than hyperdeveloped and hypercon-
centrated forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity, and emphati-
cally not those aspects that polarize people in relations of domination and
power. It will be possible to build a two-way bridge between human
beings and machines and, once we have established that, to herald new
and confident alliances between them.
96 From Schizo Bypasses fa Poslmodern Impasses
In what follows, I shall address the following problem: that today's
information and communication machines do not merely convey repre-
sentational contents, but also contribute to the fabrication of new assemb-
lages of enunciation, individual and collective.
Before going any further, we must ask whether subjectivity'S "entry
into the machine" - as in the past, when one "entered" a religious order
is really all that new. Weren't precapitalist or archaic subjectivities
already engendered by a variety of initiatory, social and rhetorical ma-
chines embedded in clan, religious, military and feudal institutions,
among others? For present purposes, I shall group these machines under
the general rubric of collective apparatuses [equipements] of subjectiJication.
Monastic machines, which passed down memories from antiquity to the
present day, thereby enriching our modernity, are a case in point. Were
they not the computer programs, the "macroprocessors", of the Middle
Ages? The neoplatonists, in their own way, were the first programmers of
a processuality capable of spanning time and surviving periods of stasis.
And what was the Court of Versailles, with its minutely detailed admin-
istration of flows of power, money, prestige and competence, and its
high-precision etiquette, if not a machine deliberately designed to churn
out a new and improved aristocratic subjectivity - one far more securely
under the yoke of the royal State than the seignorial aristocracy of the
feudal tradition, and entertaining different relations of suqjection to the
values of the rising bourgeoisie?
It is beyond the scope of this article to sketch even a thumbnail history
of these collective apparatuses of subjectification. As I see it, neither
history nor sociology is equal to the task of providing the analytical or
political keys to the processes in play. I shall therefore limit myself to
highlighting several fundamental paths/voices [voie/voix] that these ap-
paratuses have produced, and whose crisscrossing remains the basis for
modes and processes of subjectification in contemporary Western so-
cieties. I distinguish three series:
Paths/voices of power circumscribing and circumventing human
groupings from the outside, either through direct coercion of,
and panoptic grip on, bodies, or through imaginary capture of minds.
2 Paths/voices of knowledge articulating themselves with technoscien-
tific and economic pragmatics from within subjectivity.
3 Paths/voices of self-reference developing a processual subjectivity
that defines its own coordinates and is self-consistent (what I have
discussed elsewhere under the category of the 'subject-group'), but
can nevertheless establish transversal relations to mental and social
stratifications.
Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 97
(1) Power over exterior territorialities, (2) deterritorialized modes of
knowledge about human activities and machines, and (3) the creativity
proper to subjective mutations: these three paths/voices, though in-
scribed in historical time and rigidly incarnated in sociological divisions
and segregations, are forever entwining in unexpected and strange
dances, alternating between fights to the death and the promotion of new
figures.
I should note in passing that the schizoanalytic perspective on the
processes of subjectification I am proposing will make only very limited
use of dialectical or structuralist approaches, systems theory or even
genealogical approaches as understood by Michel Foucault. In my view,
all systems for defining models are in a sense equal, all are tenable, but
only to the extent that their principles of intelligibility renounce any
universalist pretensions, and that their sole mission be to help map real
existing territories (sensory, cognitive, affective and aesthetic universes)
- and even then only in relation to carefully delimited areas and periods.
This relativism is not in -the least embarrassing, epistemologically speak-
ing: it holds that the regularities, the quasi-stable configurations, for
which our immediate experiences first emerge a're precisely those systems
of self-modeling invoked earlier as self-reference, the third path/voice. In
this kind of system, discursive links, whether of expression or of content,
obey ordinary logics of larger and institutional discursive ensembles only
remotely, against the gra-in, or in a disfiguring way. To put it another
way: at this level, absolutely anything goes any ideology, or even
religion will do, even the most archaic: all that matters is that it be used
as the raw material of existence. 2
The problem is to situate appropriately this third path/voice, of crea-
tive, transforming self-reference, in relation to the first two, modes of
power and modes of knowledge. I h ~ v said both that self-reference is the
most singular, the most contingent path/voice, the one that anchors
human realities in finitude, and that it is the most universal one, the one
that effects the most dazzling crossings between heterogeneous domains.
I might have used other terms: it is not so much that this path/voice is
"universal" in the strict sense, but that it is the richest in what may be
called universes of virtuality, the best endowed with lines of process-
uality. (I ask the reader here not to begrudge me my plethora of quali-
fiers, or the meaning-overload of certain expressions, or even the
vagueness of their cognitive scope: there is no other way to proceed!)
The paths/voices of power and knowledge are inscribed in external
referential coordinates guaranteeing that they are used extensively and
that their meaning is precisely circumscribed. The Earth was once the
primary referent for modes of power over bodies and populations, just as
capital was the referent for economic modes of knowledge and mastery
98 From Schizo Bypasses to Poslmodern Impasses
of the means of production. With the figureless and foundationless Body
without Organs of self-reference we see spreading before us an entirely
different horizon, that of a new machinic processuality considered as the
continual point of emergence of all forms of creativity.
I must emphasize that the triad territorialized power-deterritorialized
knowledge-processual self-reference has no other aim than to clarify
certain problems for example, the current rise of neoconservative
ideologies and other, even more pernicious archaisms. It goes without
saying that so perfunctory a model cannot even claim to begin to map
concrete processes of subjectification. Suffice it to say that these terms
are instruments for a speculative cartography that makes no pretense of
providing a universal structural foundation or increasing on-the-ground
efficiency. This is another way of saying, by way of a reminder, that these
paths/voices have not always existed and undoubtedly will not always
exist (at least, not in the same form). Thus, there may be some relevance
in trying to locate their historical emergence, and the thresholds of
consistency they have crossed in order to enter and remain in the orbit of
our modernity.
It is safe to assume that their various consistencies are supported by
collective systems for "memorizing" data and modes of knowledge, as
well as by material apparatuses of a technical, scientific and aesthetic
nature. We can, then, attempt to date these fundamental subjective
mutations in relation, on the one hand, to the historical birth of large-
scale religious and cultural collective arrangements, and on the other, to
the invention of new materials and energies, new machines for crystal-
lizing time and, finally, to new biological technologies. It is not a ques-
tion of material infrastructures that directly condition collective
subjectivity, but of components essential for a given setup to take consis-
tency in space and time as a function of technical, scientific and artistic
transformations.
These considerations have led me to distinguish three zones of histor-
ical fracture on the basis of which, over the last thousand years, the three
fundamental capitalist components have come into being: the age of
European Christianity, marked by a new conception of the relations be-
tween the Earth and power; the age of capitalist abstractz'on or deterritoriali-
zation of knowledge and technique, founded on principles of general
equivalence; and the age of planetary computerization, creating the possi-
bility for creative and singularizing processuality to become the new
fundamental point of reference.
With respect to the last point, one is forced to admit that there are very
few objective indications of a shift away from oppressive mass-mediatic
modernity toward some kind of more liberating postmedia era in which
SUbjective assemblages of self-reference might come into their own.
Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 99
Nevertheless, it is my guess that it is only through "remappings" of the
production of computerized subjectivity that the path/voice of self-refer-
ence will be able to reach its full amplitude. Obviously, nothing is a
foregone conclusion - and nothing that could be done in this domain
could ever substitute for innovative social practices. The only point I am
making is that, unlike other revolutions of subjective emancipation -
Spartacus and other slave rebellions, peasant revolts during the Reforma-
tion, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune and so on - individual
and social practices for the self-valorization and self-organization of
subjectivity are now within our reach and, perhaps for the first time in
history, have the potential to lead to something more enduring than mad
and ephemeral spontaneous outpourings - in other words, to lead to a
fundamental repositioning of human beings in relation to both their
machinic and natural environments (which, at any rate, now tend to
coincide).
The Age of European Christianity
In Western Europe, a new figure of subjectivity arose from the ruins of
the late Roman and Carolingian empires. It can be characterized by a
double articulation com9ining two aspects: first, the relatively autono-
mous base territorial entities of ethnic, national or religious character,
which originally constituted the texture of feudal segmentarity, but have
survived in other forms up to the present day; and second, the dcterritor-
ializcd subjective power entity transmitted by the Catholic Church and
structured as a collective setup on a European scale.
Unlike earlier formulas for imperial power, Christianity's central figure
of power did not assert a direct, totalitarian-totalizing hold over the base
territories of society and of subjectivity. Long before Islam, Christianity
had to renounce its desire to form an organic unity. However, far from
weakening processes for the integration of subjectivity, the disappearance
of a flesh-and-blood Caesar and the promotion of a deterritorialized
Christ (who cannot be said to be a substitute for the former) only
reinforced them. It seems to me that the conjunction between the partial
autonomy of the political and economic spheres proper to feudal seg-
mentarity and the hyperfusional character of Christian subjectivity (as
seen in the Crusades and the adoption of aristocratic codes such as the
Peace of God, as described by Georges Duby) has resulted in a kind of
fault line, a metastable equilibrium favoring the proliferation of other
equally partial processes of autonomy. This can be seen in the schismatic
vitality of religious sensibility and reflection that characterized the medie-
val period; and of course in the explosion of aesthetic creativity, which
100 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
has continued unabated since then; the first great "takeoff" of techno-
logies and commercial exchange, which is known to historians as the
"industrial revolution of the eleventh century", and was a correlate of the
appearance of new figures of urban organization. What could have given
this tortured, unstable, ambiguous formula the surfeit of consistency that
was to see it persist and flourish through the terrible historical trials
awaiting it: barbarian invasions, epidemics, never-ending wars? Sche-
matically, one can identify six series of factors:
First: The promotion of a monotheism that would prove in practice to
be quite flexible and evolutionary, able to adapt itself more or less
successfully to particular subjective positions - for example, even those
of "barbarians" or slaves. The fact that flexibility in a system of ideologi-
cal reference can be a fundamental asset for its survival is a basic
given, which can be observed at every important turning point in the
history of capitalist subjectivity (think, for example, of the surprising
adaptive abilities enabling contemporary capitalism literally to swallow
the so-called socialist economies whole). Western Christianity's consoli-
dation of new ethical and religious patterns led to two parallel markets
of subjectification: one involves the perpetual reconstitution of
the base territorialities (despite many setbacks), and a redefmi-
tion of fIliation suzerainty and national networks; the other involves a
predisposition to the free circulation of knowledge, monetary signs,
aesthetic figures, technology, goods, people, and so forth. This kind
of market prepared the ground for the deterritorialized capitalist
path/voice.
Second: The cultural establishment of a disciplinary grid onto Christian
populations through a new type of religious machine, the original base
for which was the parish school system created by Charlemagne, but
which far outlived his empire.
Third: The establishment of enduring trade organizations, guilds, mon-
asteries, religious orders and so forth, functioning as so many "data-
banks" for the era's modes of knowledge and technique.
Fourth: The widespread use of iron, and wind and water mills; the
development of artisan and urban mentalities. It must be emphasized,
however, that this first flowering of machinism only implanted itself in a
somewhat parasitic, "encysted" manner within the great human assemb-
lages on which the large-scale systems of production continued essen-
tially to be based. In other words, a break had not yet been made with the
fundamental and primordial relation of human being to tool.
Fifth: The appearance of machines operating by much more advanced
subjective integration: clocks striking the same canonical hours
throughout all of Christendom; and the step-by-step invention of various
forms of religious music subordinated to scripture.
Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 101
Sixth: The selective breeding of animal and plant species, making
possible a rapid quantitative expansion of demographic and economic
parameters, and therefore leading to a rescaling of the assemblages in
question.
In spite or because of the colossal pressures - including territorial
restrictions but also enriching acculturations - associated with the By-
zantine Empire, then Arab imperialism, as well as with nomadic and
"barbarian" powers (which introduced, most notably, metallurgical in-
novations), the cultural hotbed of protocapitalist Christianity attained a
relative (but long-term) stability with respect to the three fundamental
poles governing its relations of power and knowledge: peasant, religious
and aristocratic subjectification. In shon, the "machinic advances"
linked to urban development and the flowering of civil and military
technologies were simultaneously encouraged and contained. All this
constitutes a kind of "state of nature" of the relation between human
being and tool, which continues to haunt paradigms of the "Work,
Family, Fatherland" type even today.
The Age of Capitalist Deterritorialization of Modes of Knowl-
edge and Technique
The second component of capitalist subjectivity begins effectively in the
eighteenth century. It is marked above all by a growing disequilibrium in
the relation of human being to tool. Human beings also witnessed the
disappearance and eradication of social territorialities that, until then,
were thought to be permanent and inalienable. Their landmarks of social
and physical corporeality were profoundly shaken. The universe of refer-
ence for the new system of generalized exchange was no longer territorial
segmentarity, but rather capital as a mode of semiotic reterritorialization
of human activities and structures uprooted by machinic processes.
Once, a real Despot or imaginary God served as the operational keystone
for the local recomposition of actual territories. Now, though, that role
would be played by symbolic capitalization of abstract values of power
bearing on economic and technological modes of knowledge indexed to
newly de territorialized social classes, and creating a general equivalence
between all valorizations of goods and human activities. A system of this
sort cannot preserve its historical consistency without resorting to a kind
of endless headlong race, with a constant renegotiation of the stakes. The
new "capitalist passion" would sweep up everything in its path, in par-
ticular the cultures and territorialities that had succeeded to one degree
or another in escaping the Christian steamroller. The principal consist-
ency factors of this component are the following:
102 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
First: The general spread of the printed text into all aspects of social
and cultural life, correlated with a certain weakening of the performative
force of direct oral communication; by the same token, capabilities of
accumulating and processing knowledge are greatly expanded.
Second: The primacy of steam-powered machines and steel, which
multiplied the power of machinic vectors to propagate themselves on
land, sea and air, and across every technological, economic and urban
space.
Third: The manipulation of time, which is emptied of its natural
rhythms by: chronometric machines leading to a Taylorist rationalization
of labor power; techniques of economic semiotization, for example,
involving credit money, which imply a general virtualization of capacities
for human initiative and a predictive calculus bearing on domains of
innovation - checks written on the future - all of which makes possible
an unlimited expansion of the imperium of market economies.
Fourth: The biological revolutions, beginning with Pasteur's dis-
coveries, that have linked the future of living species ever more closely to
the development of biochemical industries.
Human beings find themselves relegated to a position of quasi-para-
sitic adjacency to the machinic phyla. Each of their organs and social
relations are quite simply repatterned in order to be reallocated, over-
coded, in accordance with the global requirements of the system. (The
most gripping and prophetic representations of these bodily rearrange-
ments are found in the work of Leonardo da Vinci, Breughel, and
especially Arcimboldi.)
The paradox of this functionalization of human o r g n ~ and faculties
and its attendant regime of general equivalence between systems of value
is that, even as it stubbornly continues to invoke universalizing perspec-
tives, all it ever manages to do historically is fold back on itself, yielding
reterritorializations of nationalist, classist, corporatist, racist and
nationalist kinds. Because of this, it inexorably returns to the most
conservative, at times caricatured, paths/voices. The "spirit of enlighten-
ment", which marked the advent of this second figure of capitalist
subjectivity, is necessarily accompanied by an utterly hopeless fetishiza-
tion of profit - a specifically bourgeois libidinal power formula. That
formula distanced itself from the old emblematic systems of control over
territories, people and goods by employing more deterritorialized media-
tions only to secrete the most obtuse, asocial and infantilizing of
subjective groundworks. Despite the appearance of freedom of thought
that the new capitalist monotheism is so fond of affecting, it has always
presupposed an archaistic, irrational grip on unconscious subjectivity,
most notably through hyperindividuated apparatuses of responsibility -
and guilt-production, which, carried to a fever pitch, lead to compulsive
Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 103
self-punishment and morbid cults of blame - perfectly repertoried in
Kafka's universe.
The Age of Planetary Computerization
Here, in the third historical zone, the preceding pseudo-stabilities are
upset in an entirely different way. The machine is placed under the
control of subjectivity - not a reterritorialized human subjectivity, but a
new kind of machinic subjectivity. Here are several characteristics of the
taking-consistency of this new epoch:
First: Media and telecommunications tend to "double" older oral and
scriptural relations. It is worth noting that in the resulting polyphony, not
only human but also machinic paths/voices link into databanks, artificial
intelligence and the like. Public opinion and group tastes are developed
by statistical and modelizing apparatuses, such as those of the advenising
and film industries.
Second: Natural raw materials are replaced by a multitude of new
custom-made, chemically produced materials (plastics, new alloys, semi-
conductors and so on). The rise of nuclear fission, and perhaps soon
nuclear fusion, would seem to augur a considerable increase in energy
resources - providing, of course, that irreparable pollution disasters do
not occur! As always, everything will depend on the new social assemb-
lages' capacity for collective reappropriation.
Third: The temporal dimensions to which microprocessors provide
access allow enormous quantities of data and huge numbers of problems
to be processed in infinitesimal amounts of time, enabling the new
machinic subjectivities to stay abreast of the challenges and issues con-
fronting them.
Fourth: Biological engineering is making possible unlimited remodeling
oflife forms; this may lead to a radical change in the conditions oflife on
the planet and, consequently, to an equally radical reformulation of all of
its ethological and imaginary references.
The burning question, then, becom.es this: Why have the immense
processual potentials brought forth by the revolutions in information
processing, telematics, robotics, office automation, biotechnology and so
on up to now led only to a monstrous reinforcement of earlier systems of
alienation, an oppressive mass-media culture and an infantilizing politics
of consensus? What would make it possible for them finally to usher in a
postmedia era, to disconnect themselves from segregative capitalist
values and to give free rein to the first stirrings, visible today, of a
revolution in intelligence, sensitivity and creativity? Any number of dog-
matisms claim to have found the answer to these questions in a violent
104 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
affirmation of one of the three capitalist paths/voices at the expense of the
others. There are those who dream of returning to the legitimated powers
of bygone days, to the clear circumscription of people, races, religions,
castes and sexes. Paradoxically, the neo-Stalinists and social democrats,
both of whom are incapable of conceiving of the socius in any terms other
than its rigid insertion into State structures and functions, must be
placed in the same category. There are those whose faith in capitalism
leads them to justify all of the terrible ravages of modernity - on people,
culture, the environment - on the grounds that in the end they will bring
the benefits of progress. Finally, there are those whose fantasies of a
radical liberation of human creativity condemn them to chronic margi-
nality, to a world of false pretense, or who turn back to take refuge
behind a facade of socialism or communism.
Our project, on the contrary, is to attempt to rethink these three
necessarily interwoven paths/voices. No engagement with the creative
phyla of the third path/voice is tenable unless new existential territories
are concurrently established. Without hearkening back to the post-Carol-
ingian pathos, they must nevertheless include protective mechanisms for
the person and the imaginary and create a supportive environment.
Surely the mega-enterprises of the second path/voice - the great collec-
tive scientific and industrial adventures, the administration of knowledge
markets still have legitimacy: but only on the condition that they
redefine their goals, which remain today singularly deaf and blind to
human truths. Is it still enough to claim profit as the only goal? In any
case, the aim of the division of labor, and of emancipatory social prac-
tices, must be redirected toward a fundamental right to singularity, toward
an ethic of finitude that is all the more demanding of individuals and
social entities, because its imperatives are not founded on transcendent
principles. It has become apparent in this regard that ethicopolitical
universes of reference now tend to institute themselves as extensions of
aesthetic universes, which in no way authorize the use of such terms as
"perversion" or "sublimation" It will be noted that not only the existen-
tial operators pertaining to these ethicopolitical matters but the aesthetic
operators as well inevitably reach the point at which meaning breaks
down, entailing irreversible processual engagements whose agents are,
more often than not, incapable of accounting for anything (least of all
themselves) - and are therefore exposed to a panoply of risks, including
madness. Only if the third path/voice takes consistency in the direction
of self-reference - carrying us from the consensual media era to the
dissensual postmedia era - will each be able to assume his or her process-
ual potential and, perhaps, transform this planet - a living hell for over
three quarters of its population - into a universe of creative enchant-
ments.
Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 105
I imagine that this language will ring false to many a jaded ear, and that
even the least malicious will accuse me of utopianism. Utopia, it is true,
gets bad press these days, even when it acquires a charge of realism and
efficiency, as it has with the Greens in Germany. But let there be no
mistake: these questions of subjectivity production do not only concern
a handful of illuminati. Look at Japan, the prototypical model of new
capitalist subjectivities. Not enough emphasis has been placed on the fact
that one of the essential ingredients of the miracle mix showcased for
visitors to Japan is that the collective subjectivity produced there on a
massive scale combines the highest of "high-tech" components with
feudalisms and archaisms inherited from the mists of time. Once again,
we find the reterritorializing function of an ambiguous monotheism -
Shinto-Buddhism, a mix of animism and universal powers - contributing
to the establishment of a flexible formula for subjectification going far
beyond the triadic framework of capitalist Christian paths/voices. We
have a lot to learn!
For now, though, consider another extreme, the case of Brazil. There,
phenomena involving the reconversion of archaic subjectivities have
taken an entirely different turn. It is common knowledge that a consider-
able proportion of the population is mired in such extreme poverty that
it lives outside the money economy, but that does not prevent Brazil's
industry being ranked sixth among Western powers. In this society, a
dual society if there ever was one, there is a double sweep of subjectivity:
on the one hand, there is a fairly racist Yankee wave (like it or not)
beamed in on one of the most powerful television networks
in the world, and on the other, an animist wave involving religions like
candombli, passed on more or less directly from the African cultural
heritage, which are now escaping their original ghettoization and spread-
ing throughout society, including the most well-connected circles of Rio
and Sao Paulo. It is interesting that, in this case, mass- media penetration
is preceding capitalist acculturation. What did President Sarney do when
he wanted to stage a decisive coup against inflation, which was running
as high as 400 percent per year? He went on television. Brandishing a
piece of paper in front of the cameras, he declared that from the moment
he signed the order he held in his hand everyone watching would become
his personal representative and would have the right to arrest any mer-
chant who did not respect the official pricing system. It seems to have
been surprisingly effective - but at the price of considerable regression in
the legal system.
Capitalism in permanent crisis (Integrated Worldwide Capitalism) is at
a total subjective impasse. It knows that paths/voices of self-reference are
indispensable for its expansion, and thus for its survival, yet it is under
tremendous pressure to efface them. A kind of superego - that booming
106 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
Carolingian voice - dreams only of crushing them and reterritorializing
them onto archaic images. Let us attempt to find a way out of this vicious
circle by resituating our three capitalist paths/voices in relation to the
geopolitical coordinates - First, Second and Third Worlds - commonly
used to establish a hierarchy of the major subjective formations. For
Western Christian subjectivity, everything was (and, unconsciously, re-
mains) quite simple: it has no restrictions in latitude and longitude. It is
the transcendent center around which everything is deemed to revolve.
The paths/voices of capital, for their part, have continued their onward
rush first westward, toward elusive "new frontiers", more recently
toward the East, in conquest of what remains of the ancient Asiatic
empires (Russia included). However, this mad race has reached the end
of the road, from one direction in California, from the other in Japan.
The second path/voice of capital has closed the circle; the world has
buckled, the system is saturated. Henceforth, the North-South axis will
perhaps function as the third path/voice of self-reference. This is what I
cali "the barbarian compromise" The old walls marking the limits of
"barbarism" have been tom down, deterritorialized once and for all. The
last shepherds of monotheism have lost their flocks, for it is not in the
nature of the new subjectivity to be herded. Moreover, capitalism itself is
now beginning to shatter into animist and machinic polyvocity. What a
fabulous reversal, if the old Mrican, pre-Columbian and aboriginal sub-
jectivities became the final recourse for subjective reappropriation of
machinic self-reference! The very same blacks, Indians, even South Sea
Islanders whose ancestors chose death over submission to Christian and
capitalist ideals of power: first slavery, then the exchange economy.
I hope that my last examples are not faulted for being overly exotic.
Even in Old World countries such as Italy there has been a proliferation
of small family enterprises in symbiosis with cutting-edge sectors of the
electronics industry and telematics; this has happened over the last few
years in the northeast-center triangle ofItaly, If an Italian Silicon Valley
develops there, it wiil be founded on a reconversion of subjective ar-
chaisms originating in the country's antiquated patriarchal structures.
Some futurologists, who are in no way crackpots, predict that certain
Mediterranean countries - Italy and Spain, in particular - will overtake
the great ecoriomic centers of northern Europe in a few decades' time. So
when it comes to dreaming and utopia, the future is wide open! My wish
is that all those who remain attached to the idea of social progress - all
those for whom the social has not become an illusion or a "simulacrum"
look seriously into these questions of subjectivity production. The
SUbjectivity of power does not fall from the sky. It is not written into our
chromosomes that divisions of knowledge and labor must necessarily
lead to the hideous segregations humanity now suffers. Unconscious
Regimes, Pathways, Subjects 107
figures of power and knowledge are not universals. They are tied to
reference myths profoundly anchored in the psyche, but they can still
swing around toward liberatory paths/voices. Subjectivity today remains
under the massive control of apparatuses of power and knowledge, thus
consigning technical, scientific and artistic innovations to the service of
the most reactionary and retrograde figures of sociality. In spite of that,
other modalities of subjective production - processual and singularizing
ones - are conceivable. These alternate forms of existential reappropria-
tion and self-valorization may in the future become the reason for living
for human collectivities and individuals who refuse to give in to the
deathlike entropy characterizing the period we are passing through.
Notes
This essay was published il) Incorporations, eds. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New
York: Unone, 1992). It corresponds to the "Liminaire" of Guattari's Cartographies schi-
zoanalytiques (Paris: Gallilee, 1989).
1 A nanosecond is 10-
9
seconds; a pico-second is 10-
12
On the futurological themes
touched onhere, see the special issue of Science et uclmique entitled "Rappon sur I'etat
de la technique", ed. Thierry Gaudin.
2 The immediate aim of their expressive chains is no longer to denote states of fact or to
embed states of sense in significational axes but - I repeat - to activate existential
crystallizations operating, in a cenain way, outside the fundamental principles of
classical reason: identity, the excluded middle, causality, sufficient reason, conti-
nuity The most difficult thing to convey is that these materials, which can set
processes of subjective self-reference in motion, are themselves extracted from radically
heterogeneous, not to mention heteroclite, elements: rhythms oflived time, obsessive
refrains, identificational emblems, transitional objects, fetishes of all kinds. What
is affirmed in this crossing of regions of being and modes of semiotization are traits of
singularization that date - something like existential postmatks - as well as "event",
"contingent" states of fact, their referential correlates and their corresponding assemb-
lages of enunciation. Rational modes of discursive knowledge cannot fully grasp this
double capacity of intensive traits to singularize and transversalize existence, enabling
it, on the one: hand, to persist locally, and on the other hand, to consist transversally
(giving it traDsconsistency). It is accessible to apprehension only on the order of affect,
a global transferential grasp whereby that which is most universal is conjoined with the
most highly contingent facticity: the loosest of meaning's ordinary moorings becomes
anchored iIi the finitude of being-there. Various traditions of what could be termed
"narrow rationalism" persist in a quasi-militant, syste:mic incomprehension of anything
in these: metamodelizations pertaining to virtual and incorporeal universes, fuzzy
worlds of uncenainty, the aleatory and the probable. Long ago, narrow rationalism
banished from anthropology those modes of categorization it considered "pre logical" ,
when they were in reality metalogical or paralogical, their objective essentially being to
give consistency to individual and/or collective assemblages of subjectivity. What we
need to conceptualize is a continuum running from children's games and the makeshift
ritualizations accompanying attempts at psychopathological recompositions of "schi-
zoid" worlds, through the complex canographies of myth and art, all the way to the
sumptuous speculative edifices of theology and philosophy, which have sought to
108 From Schizo Bypasses 10 Postmodem Impasses
apprehend these same dimensions of existential creativity (examples are Plotinus's
"forgetful souls" and the "unmoving motor" which, according to Leibniz, preexists any
dissipation of potential.)
Translaud by Brian Massumi
9
The Postmodern Impasse
A cenain conception of progress and modernity has become bankrupt
and, in the process, compromised collective confidence in the notion of
an emancipatory social practice. At the same time, a son of glaciation has
got the upper hand in social relations: hierarchies and segregations have
hardened, misery and, unemployment tend today to be accepted as
necessary evils, while the unions hang onto the last institutional branches
conceded to them. The unions, as well, are glued to corporatist practices
that lead them to adopt conservative attitudes, which at times resemble
those of reactionary circles. The communist left is sinking into ossifica-
tion and dogmatism, while the socialist panies, concerned with presen-
ting themselves as reliable technocratic partners, have given up any
progressive questioning of existing structures. It should come as no
surprise, then, that the ideologies that once claimed to serve as guides for
reconstructing society on a more just and egalitarian basis have lost their
credibility.
Does it follow, then, that we are condemned to remain helpless before
the rise of this new order of cruelty and cynicism that is about to
overwhelm the planet, an order that seems determined, it would seem, to
persist? It is to this regrettable conclusion that a number of intellectuals
and artists, especially those influenced by postmodernist thought, have
arrived.
I will have to leave aside, for the purposes of this paper, the launching
(by the managers of contemporary an) of large promotional operations
dubbed "neo-expressionism" in Germany; "Bad Painting" or "New
Painting" in the US; "Trans-avant-garde" in Italy; "Free Repre-
sentation" and the "New Fauvism" in France, and so on. Otherwise, it
would be too easy for me to demonstrate that postmodernism is nothing
but the last gasp of modernism; nothing, that is, but a reaction to and, in
a certain way, a mirror ofthe formalist abuses and reductions of modern-
ism from which, in the end, it is no different. No doubt there will emerge
from these schools some authentic painters whose personal talent will
protect them against the pernicious effects of this sort of fad that main-
tains itself by means of publicity. In any case, postmodernism will not be
able to revive the creative phylum as it has claimed.
110 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodem Impasses
On the other hand, because it is better secured to the deeply reterritor-
ializing tendencies of present capitalistic subjectivity, postmodem archi-
tecture seems to me less superficial and much more indicative of the
place assigned to art by the dominant power formations.
Let me explain myself. From time immemorial, and regardless of
which historical misadventure, the capitalist drive has always combined
two fundamental components: the first, which I call deterritorialization,
has to do with the destruction of social territories, collective identities,
and systems of traditional values; the second, which I call the movement
of reterritorialization, has to do with the recomposition, even by the most
artificial means, of personologically individuated frameworks, schemata
of power, and models of submission which are, if not formally similar to
those this drive has destroyed, at least homothetical from a functional
perspective.
As the de territorializing revolutions, tied to the development of
science, technology, and the arts, sweep aside everything before them, a
compulsion toward subjective reterritorialization also emerges. And this
antagonism is heightened even more with the phenomenal growth of the
communications and computer fields, to the point where the latter
concentrate their deterritorializing effects on such human faculties as
memory, perception, understanding, imagination, etc. In this way, a
certain formula of anthropological functioning, and a certain ancestral
model of humanity, is appropriated from the inside. And I think that it is
as a result of an incapacity to adequately confront this phenomenal
mutation that collective subjectivity has abandoned itself to the absurd
wave of conservatism that we are presently witnessing.
Let's return to our postmodem architects. Whereas in the domain of
the plastic arts, young painters are required to submit to the prevalent
conservatism of the market, failing which they find themselves con-
demned to vegetate on the margins, here adaptation to the values of the
most retrograde neo-liberalism is made without hesitation. And while
painting has never been for the ruling classes anything more than a
matter of a "supplement of the spirit", a kind of currency of prestige,
architecture has always occupied a major place in the making of terri-
tories of power, the fixing of its emblems, and the proclamation of its
durability.
Are we not, then, at the center of what Jean-Franc;ois Lyotard calls the
postmodem condition, which I, unlike him, understand to be the para-
digm of all submission and every sort of compromise with the existing
status quo? For Lyotard, postmodemism represents the collapse of what
he calls the grand narratives of legitimation (for example, the discourses
of the Enlightenment, those of Hegel's accomplishment of the Spirit and
the Marxist emancipation of the workers). It would always be wise,
The Postmodern Impasse III
according to Lyotard, to be suspicious of the least desire for concerted
social action. Any promotion of consensus as an ideal, Lyotard argues, is
to be regarded as out-dated and suspect. Only little narratives of
legitimation, in other words, the "pragmatics of linguistic particles" that
are multiple, heterogeneous, and whose performativity would be only
limited in time and space, can still save some aspects of justice and
freedom. In this way, Lyotard joins other theorists, such as Jean Baudril-
lard, for whom the social and political have never been more than traps,
or "semblances", for which it would be wise to lose one's fondness.
Whether they are painters, architects, or philosophers, the heroes of
postmodernism have in common the belief that the crises experienced
today in artistic and social practices can only lead to an irrevocable
refusal of any large-scale social undertaking. So we ought to take care of
our own backyards first and, preferably, in conformity with the habits
and customs of our contemporaries. Don't rock the boat! Just drift with
the currents of the marketplace of art and opinion that are modulated by
publicity campaigns and surveys.
But where does the idea that the socius is reducible to the facts of
language, and that these facts are in turn reducible to binarizable and
"digitalizable" signifying chains, come from? On this point postmodern-
ists have hardly said anything innovative! In fact, their views are directly
in keeping with the modernist tradition of structuralism, whose influence
on the human sciences appears to have been a carry-over from the worst
aspects of Anglo-Saxon systematization. The secret link that binds these
various doctrines, I believe, stems from a subterranean relationship -
marked by reductionist conceptions, and conveyed immediately after the
war by information theory and new cybernetic research. The references
that everyone continually made to the new communications and computer
technologies were so hastily developed, so poorly mastered, that they put
us far behind the phenomenological research that had preceded them.
Here we must return to a basic truism, but one pregnant with implica-
tions; namely, that concrete social assemblages - not to be confused with
the "primary group" of American sociology, which only reflects the
economy of opinion polls - call into question much more than just
linguistic performance: for example, ethological and ecological dimen-
sions, as well as the economic semiotic components, aesthetic, corporeal
and fantasmatic ones that are irreducible to the semiology of language,
and the diverse incorporeal universes of reference which are not readily
inscribed within the coordinates of the dominiant empiricity
Postmodern philosophers flit around pragmatic research in vain. They
remain loyal to a structuralist conception of speech and language that
will never allow them to articulate the subjective facts in the formations
of the unconscious, aesthetic and micro-political problematics. To say it
112 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmodern Impasses
in the clearest way possible, this view does not merit the name of
philosophy, for it is only a prevalent state of mind, a "condition" of
public opinion that pulls its truths out of the air. Why should it take the
time to elaborate, for example, a serious speculative support for its theory
regarding the inconsistency of the socius? Doesn't the present ubiquity of
the mass media amply demonstrate that, in effect, any social link can
stand in for, without any noticeable resistance, the desingularizing and
infantilizing levelling of the capitalist production of signifiers? An old
Lacanian adage, according to which "a signifer represents the subject for
another signifier", could serve as an epigram for this new ethic of non-
commitment. Because this is, in fact, what we have come to! Except,
however, that there is nothing really to rejoice about, as the postmodern-
ists seem to think. The question, rather, ought to be: how can we escape
this dead end?
For their part, linguists concerned with theories of enunciation and
speech acts have highlighted the fact that certain linguistic segments,
parallel to their well-known classical functions of signification and deno-
tation, can acquire a particular pragmatic effectiveness by crystallizing
the respective positions of speaking subjects or by putting into place, de
facto, certain situational frames. (The classical example being the presi-
dent who declares "the session is open", and in so doing, really opens the
session.) But these linguists have decided they must limit the significance
of their discovery to the register of their specialization. Whereas in reality
this third "existentializing" function, the one they emphasize, oUght to
imply, logically speaking, a definitive break with the structuralist corset
within which they continue to constrain l a ~ g u a g e
It is not by right that the linguistic signifier occupies the royal place that
capitalist subjectivation has afforded it, on account of constituting an
essential support for its logic of generalized equivalence, and its politics of
the capitalization of abstract values of power. Other regimes are capable
of "running" the businesses of the world, and in this way deposing the
signifier from its transcendent position with regard to the rhizomes woven
by the realities and imaginaries of this symbolic-signifying imperium, in
which the current hegemony of mass-mediated power is rooted. But they
will certainly not be born through spontaneous generation. Rather, they
are there to be constructed and brought within reach at the intersection of
new analytic, aesthetic, and social practices; practices that no postmod-
emist spontaneity will be able to offer us on a platter.
Notes
"L'impassepost-modeme" appeared in La Quinzainelineroire 456 (du ler au 15 Fev. 1986):
21. It is an extract from a paper first delivered at a conference in Tokyo during November
The Postmodem Impasse 113
1985, and repeated in Paris before the College de peinture of the Universite europeenne de
philosophie on January 10, 1986. A slightly longer extract from Guattari's paper appeared
as "The Postmodem Dead End", trans. Nancy Blake, Flash Art 128 (1986): 40-1. Guattari
continues: "The emergence of these new practices of subjectivation in a posunedia era will
be greatly facilitated by a concened reappropriation of communications and data processing
technologies, insofar as they will gradually make possible: I) the promotion of new forms of
collective agreement and interaction and, in the end, a re-invention of demoCracy; 2)
through the miniaturization and personalization of machinery, a re-singularization ofmech-
anically m ~ d i t e d means of expression; one can presume, in this connection, that the most
surprising prospects will be afforded by the extension of data banks to network proportions;
3) the unlimited multiplication of the 'existential levers' that will make it possible to accede
to changing creative realms.
Let us point out, finally, that the decentralization and subjective autonomizBtion of
postmedia opcratorswill not correspond to a withdrawal or to a posunodemist type of
release. The fonhcoming posunedia revolution will have to be guided to an unprecedented
degree by those minority groups that today are still the only ones who have realized the
monal risk for humanity of questions such as: the anns race; world famine; irreversible
ecological degradation; mass-media pollution of collective subjectivity.
This, at least, is what I hope for, and it is what I humbly suggest you work for. If the future
does not follow these paths, it is unlikely to endure longer than the end of the prescot
millenium".
Translated by Todd Dufresne
10
Postmodernism and Ethical
Abdication
An Interview by Nicholas Zurbrugg
NICHOLAS ZURBRUGG - To begin with, could I ask you how you became
interested in performance poetry, particularly the work of Americans
such as Ginsberg and Burroughs. What was it that you found most
interesting in their work?
FELIX GUATTARI I first got the know them through Jean-
Jacques Lebel, the organizer of the Polyphonix festivals, I who had spent
much of his early life among that generation of artists and writers in
America. What interested me in these writers' work was the discovery of
something very similar to my own concerns - above all in the realm
of psychopathology, but also in the context of more political issues.
This may seem a litde paradoxical, because these are very different
things, but I think there is a certain overlap or convergence be-
tween them. In terms of psychopathology, it's the problem of semi-
otic reintegration - that of gesture, the body, of spatial relations and so
on.
Burroughs's cut-ups and semiotic inventions, for example, create new
universes of mutated and mutating meanings. Then, at the same time,
there's this sort of movement, which is not so much a traditional party or
association, which is reappropriating and reinventing poetry - which,
considered in ecological terms - is a disappearing species. That's why I
suggest that the problem of "mental ecology" is so important - the
problem of disappearing species, such as poetry. Because poetry is as
important as vitamin C.
It's very important for children, for example, and is often very import-
ant for psychotic patients, whether as something written or as something
declaimed. So it's this double project of untying the bonds of language
and opening up new social, analytical and aesthetic practices which
interested me in new forms of poetic performance.
NZ - Your suggestion that poetry can be reinvented is very interesting
given that many theorists of postmodern culture and mass-media prac-
tices tend to detect the neutralization of art, the death of the subject, the
Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication 115
impossibility of originality and the loss of history. Would you consider
the new mutational languages which you associate with the multi-media
poets to offer some sort of advance towards a new kind of unity?
FG - .When one considers the extent to which contemporary sensibility
is agitated by the influences of academia, the mass-media, publicity and
so on, it seems unlikely that there's any possibility of returning to the
civilizations ofthe past. Whereas here in Quebec, or doubtless in Austra-
lia, there's a privileged environment of open spaces in which one can
more or less return to spatial respirations. The future which lies ahead is
much more likely to be that of Bangladesh, Mexico, or Tokyo, where
millions of inhabitants cluster together. In this respect, it is necessary to
reinvent the body, to reinvent the mind and to reinvent language. Per-
haps the new telematic, informational, and audio-visual technologies can
help us to progress in this direction.
NZ - What would you say were the main examples of such new languages
and technologies?
FG - Well, it already seems evident that informational "language" is
evolving quite independently from traditional forms of language. Both in
terms of its interactive and intertextual aspects it is combining communi-
cative, perceptive, and sensitive dimensions in such a way that new
modes of subjectivity are no longer restricted to past textual paradigms.
We seem to be in the process of discovering a new realm of orality. We're
not going to enter into dialogue with computers via digital systems, but
by speaking directly to computers. Things will change considerably -
we'll speak to machines, we'll speak to our cars, to people working
twenty miles away - and we'll discover a new kind of sociality based upon
quite different conventions. At present this is all embryonic - but things
will probably change very rapidly in the years ahead, above all with the
development of the interactive compact disc.
NZ - Have such technologies modified your ideas and practices signifi-
cantly?
FG - I've not really changed my ideas since the sixties, when I developed
the concept of les machines desirantes - the desiring machines - and the
intersection of machines and subjectivity. That's exactly what is happen-
ing today, before our very eyes, so I've not really changed my ideas. As
for the presentation of my ideas, I remain a member of my generation,
and write with a ballpoint pen.
NZ - Are you optimistic regarding future developments?
FG - Well, there are a lot of problems and developments at present. The
main question is the extent to which we are prisoners of dominant
institutions such as academia, the media, and so on: Then, more gener-
ally, there's the problem of the way in which the West has cut itself off
from the Third World.
116 From Schizo Bypasses to Postmotiern Impasses
NZ - Given such problems, what sort of role might one attribute to
cultural avant-gardes such as the new forms of multi-media performance
that we've been talking about? Do you think that the concept of the
avant-garde still carries conviction?
FG - Avant-garde movements have often been rather dogmatic and have
tried to impose this or that kind of program or world vision. I think that
what is most significant in terms of sound poetry and performance poetry
is the attempt to re-individualize subjectivity and creativity - a tendency
that is not necessarily characteristic of some avant-garde movements. For
example, an extremely individual artist like Antonin Artaud was rejected
by the surrealist avant-garde precisely because of his individuality.
NZ - In this respect, the present sound poetry and performance poetry
avant-gardes seem most interesting as open or fragmented coalitions of
fellow artists, rather than as more systematic, programmatic movements.
FG-Exacdy.
NZ - Do you have the same reservations regarding the programmatic and
rather dogmatic ways in which the term "postmodern" has been used?
How do you respond to this term?
FG - Very unfavourably.
NZ - Don't you think that the term has at least some validity as a concept
distinguishing present work from that of the early twentieth century?
FG - Of course, but that doesn't mean that one would want to englobe
everything in a kind of neo-liberal cultural market which only values the
commercially viable. The prostitution of architecture in postmodern
buildings, the prostitution of art in trans-avant-gardc painting, and the
virtual ethical and aesthetic abdication of postmodem thought leaves a
kind of black stain upon history.
NZ - In many respects, aren't we wimcssing a kind of cultural Club
Mediterranee?
FG - Exactly.
NZ - What would you say were the most significant exceptions to these
negative impulses in postmodern culture?
FG - I can't think of very many. There are certain inventive, intelligent
advances in ecology, but even these tend to be rather dogmatic in
character. No, there's not very much. In the Third World there are some
political developments which I find very interesting, particularly union
initiatives focussing upon women's issues, health issues, youth problems,
the drugs problem and so on - lots of things - but nothing really offers a
new polarity in opposition to the dominant forms of capitalism. Since the
collapse of Eastern Europe we've wimessed a kind of triumph of domi-
nant capitalist values. In the years ahead, I think new developments will
occur on a vaster scale - on a more international scale.
NZ - Where does this leave the contemporary intellectual?
Postmodernism and Ethical Abdication 117
FG - So far as the organic intellectual is concerned, there are no more
organs. It is no longer possible to exist organically. Accordingly, it is all
the more necessary for the intellectual to be self-assertive, to be indi-
vidual, to be brave, and to continue to work, resisting the fascination
of academia, ofthe media, and of other such institutions.
Notes
This interview was published in the Australian arts magazine photoftle 39 Guly 1993): 11-13.
I This interview was recorded in June 1991 at the Oralites Colloquium during the
Polypho"ix 16 performance poetry festival in Quebec City. Another interview given by
Guanari to Richard and Richard Martel during this conference appeared
as "Felix Guanari", lnur 55 (automne 1992 - hiver 1993): 11-13. In this interview
Guattari cites examples of promising inventive and experimental relations he
witnessed in Chile that greatly pleased him involving a group of elderly persons who
had an "ecology of retirement" in which they assisted one another in the reinvention
and the eroticization of their lives and relations, as well as a group of architects who
worked in the slums helping people to make and erect personalized signposts out of
found materials (cardboard, plastic, and the like).
PART III
A Discursive Interlude
11
Institutional Practice and Politics
An Interview by Jacques Pain
JACQUES PAIN - [Guattari is invited to respond to the question of "in-
stitutional practice and politics".]
FELIX GUA"ITARJ - What you call "institutional practice", as it has con-
cerned me, has always been at the intersection of various domains which
had to be in one way or another interconnected. In the 1950s, for me this
essentially concerned:
(1) a militant practice in different youth and political organizations;
(2) a clinical practice with Jean Oury at La Borde;
(3) an analytic practice with psychotics, and later an analytic practice
with clients.
The theoretical references relative to these diverse domains were rather
discordant: Oury, Tosquelles, Lacan, Marxism, a personal attraction for
philosophy . for a long time I travelled disparate paths. In the course of a
day, or a week, I would change hats. As a militant, I was a Marxist inspired
by Trotsky; when I worked I was a Freudo-Lacanian; when I reflected I was
for the most part Sartrean, but all of that did not flow together very well.
It was in the course of discussions at the heart of GTPSI (Groupe de
travail de psychologie et de sociologie institutionnelle), under the im-
pulse of Tosquelles, who complained that one "walks with two legs" -
one Marxist leg, and another Freudian leg - that I began to reflect on
another possible analytic path, which I baptised at the time "institutional
analysis", an expression that I did not really impose on that milieu, but
which proliferated outside. It sought to make discernable a domain that
was neither that of institutional therapy, nor institutional pedagogy, nor
of the struggle for social emancipation, but which invoked an analytic
method that could traverse these multiple fields (from which came the
theme "transversality").
I came to consider the problems that we discussed at GTPSI (the
"institutional transference" for example) as not specific to relations of
122- A Discursive Interlude
mental illness, but as equally concerning the relations of the individual to
the collectivity, the environment, economic relations, aesthetic produc-
tions, etc.
Unfonunately, the expression "institutional analysis" was taken up by
people who cenainly did not lack talent (such as Laureau, Labrot,
Lapassade, etc.) but worked within a psycho-sociological perspective
which was far too reductionistic for my taste. Gaining the field of the
social and the micro-political, my intention had never been that the
analysis would thereby lose on the side of the individual and pre-personal
singularities, for example in the world of psychotics. Nothing was funher
from my intention than to propose a psycho-social model with the
pretention of offering it as a global alternative to existing methods of
analyzing the unconscious! Since that time my reflection has had as its
axis problems of what I call metamodelizarion. That is, it has concerned
something that does not found itself as an overcoding of existing mod eli-
zations, but more as a procedure of "automodelization", which appropri-
ates all or part of existing models in order to construct its own
canographies, its own reference points, and thus its own analytic ap-
proach, its own analytic methodology. So, finally, when I saw the exploi-
tation that had been wrought of "institutional analysis" (especially in
Latin America) I expunged all that, and I tried to elaborate a method of
analyzing the formations of the unconscious which was in no way simply
a tributary to the individuation of subjectivity or to its incarnation in
groups and institutions. :what was being done at Saint-Alban and La
Borde was to me already the beginning of such a decentering, allowing
the disengagement of analysis from the personological and familialist
frameworks to give an account of assemblages of enunciation of another
son (be it of a larger social size or an infra-individual size). From which
came the ulterior problematic of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in colla-
boration with Gilles Deleuze, which concerned the function of pre-per-
s0I!!1} .. - JO the totalities of .the. the i!!.dividual
and supra-personal, that is, concerning phenomena of the group, social
phenomena. FUMer, for us, the assemblages of enunciation must in-
volve "machinic components", like the components of information sys-
tems
In sum, what seemed imponant to me was to reappropriate the best of
Freud and Marx with the knowledge that the subjective formations did
not, should not, and could not coincide with the form of the individual.
Minimally, subjectivity founds itself in a complex relation to the other,
the alter ego, mother and father, relations of caste, class struggles, in
shon, to the entire context of social interaction. All this was more or less
taken up by Lacan, with his decentering of the unconscious in language,
but unfonunately was matched with a return to universals, structural
Institutional Practice and Politics 123
"mathemes" which allowed subjective individuation which had been
chased out the door of theoretical practice to re-enter by the window of
theoretical phantasms. But I don't want to go into that right now.
Once one considers that subjectivity is not assimilable to a black box
inserted in the cerebral circumvolutions, but works itself out through the
entire social and "pre-personal" context, the analysis of the unconscious
must take account of the "machinic circuits" and these assemblages of
the production of subjectivity in no way reducible to interpersonal rela-
tions relevant to oedipal triangulation. For example: the subjectivity of
the court produced at Versailles in the time of Louis XIV, or at Cham-
bord in the time of" I, takes its bearings from a new type of
"collective apparatus" promoted by the centralist system of national
royalty. The subjectivity which the aristocrats saw themselves assuming
has as its explicit object the production of a sort of "summons to
residence" close by the royal power, without relation to the institutional
"nomadism" of the ancient chevaliers. This genre of subjective assemb-
lage engaged a series of ethnologico-architectural dimensions which it
would be most interesting to study from the perspective of the later
development of collective apparatuses of producers within capitalist sub-
jectivity in the 19th and 20th centuries.
We teachers, shrinks, workers of the socius, we are thus at the same
time products of collective apparatuses and producers of subjectivity. We
are the workers at the tip of an industry, an industry that furnishes the
primary subjective matter for all other industries and social activity.
Indeed, this subjectivity has domains of individual application relative to
individual enunciators, but it is not reducible to a simple plurality of
speaking individuals; there exists a variety of entry points through which
to construct subjectivity: political, social, ecological, etc.
I do not know if I answered your Question. I at least tried to address it
in a general way.
JP - Could one say that you remain distinctly Marxist?
FG - Yes, to a certa"in extent. Moreover, one cannot change one's point
of reference with respect to such subjects as one can change a shirt, in the
manner of the ghastly nouveaux philosophes. Marx is an author of the first
degree who profoundly marked his epoch. There are certainly many
things that have come to pass since then. But I don't think this kind of
question makes much sense.
JP - It has a sense for me inasmuch as I came to your texts by way of a
militant practice, always with a demand: that of analysfs. At that time I
found in the formulations you employ throughout here and there - the
"militant analytic function", the limits of analysis - themes that appear
somewhat contradictory, but which effectively present a key. That
was what led me forcefully into your method of work. One must ask
124 A Discursive Interlude
oneself at the same time if this is not only a utopia and, at the limit, if it
is nonsensical to analyze the militant life, limiting analysis to its pur-
VIew.
FG - I repeat, I do not propose theories of reference. I do not pretend,
and have never pretended, to engage in an analysis of a scientific charac-
ter. All the same I came to think of a cartography of subjectivity in order
to gain an analytic bearing, that is to say, in order to be processual; by
definition it is necessary to have done with any scientific ideal. It seems
to me that the phenomena of social struggles, as they are disentangled
from the history of the world of work (and thus not only through the
analysis of Marxist theorists), are processes that inscribe themselves in a
genealogy of subjective locations. Thus they constitute, taken together,
relations of objective force and enterprises of the production of subjecti-
vity. One cannot understand the history of the workers' movement if one
0,,)11 refuses to see that, in certain periods, institutions of the labor movement
I have produced new types of subjectivity and, to force the issue, I would
e"ven say different "human races" A certain tYpe "ofw"orkerof the Paris
Commune thereby became so "mutant" that there was no other solution
for the bourgeoisie than to extenninate this type. They are perceived as a
diabolical menace, as insupportable. The Paris Commune was liquida-
ted, as were, in another epoch, the reformers of Saint-Bartholomew.
History also presents to us veritable wars of subjectivity which one cannot
gain access to if one does not take into account the mutations at issue
here. For example, Lenin posed explicitly the question of the invention
of a new mode of subjectivity which would distinguish itself from the
social-democratic SUbjectivity integrated with capitalism.
Today, the production of capitalist subjectivity on a grand scale,
through collective apparatuses, media, rapid systems of communication,
the production of information, telecommunications, robotics - which
tend to organize the entire planet into quadrants - is of a nature radically
different from that of "pre-capitalist" societies, founded on direct servi-
tude or on an indirect symbolic allegiance, in relatively well circum-
scribed territories, or that of proto-capitalist societies, founded on a
subjective affectation of caste or class, in the context of a general deterri-
torialization of flows (demographic, of work, exchange, culture ).
Today, not only are economic and social territories de territorialized, but
also the modes of subjectivation, which tend to be only the result of a
completely artificial production. The subjective territorialities of the
Ego, the Super-Ego, the family, the primary group, etc., are fashioned by
the productive machine. From all this results the paradoxical cocktail of
hyper-segregation and generalized communication.
In this context, how can a de-serialized
sembled, a subject I call "processual" because it produces its own_exist-
-- --. - . -.. -
Institutional Practice and Politics 125
ence across processes of singularization, because it engenders itself as
exlsrentjal'lemiory to-theextenitliat' it constitutes itself as an analytic
'is the sticky problem whIch"t circled for a couple
of decades. Against the fashions and returns to orthodoxies, post-
modernisms and neo-conservatisms, nothing appears to me more urgent!
JP - That is why you spoke earlier, before we began the interview, of the
importance of responding to the Milner operation. I have the same
thoughts.
FG - Yes, because it is a cunning attempt at disfiguring and dissuasion
with respect to any dissident pedagogical attempts and all singular pro-
cesses of institutionalization, in that dead universe of National Education.
That sermon in favor of a return to training, civic instruction, and other
throwbacks, is truly a crass stupidity, because it completely misunder-
stands the actu'al conditions of the production of subjectivity, which no
longer have anything to do with those of the epoch of Jules Ferry.
JP - It redoubles Chevenemenr perfectly_
FG - That says a lot - Chevenement has no idea: we offer him a model
and he takes it as a gift package and nothing more! It's already what he
did at the Ministere de la Recherche. But one must say that there the
result was less catastrophic! Be that as it may, Chevenement does not
have the intention of tormenting himself for a few small percentiles of
maladapted children: that makes up part of "incidental expenses", like
unemployment referred to as "structural" - it cannot be reduced. What
counts, in the context of economic competition, is the selection of elites
and, to that end, to shift to Japanese methods of formation. They are
obsessed with Japan! They don't know anything else! But the Japanese,
for their part, are beginning to seriously question themselves about the
insolvency of their own education system, which has led to a rate in
nervous breakdown, suicide and aggression towards teachers which is
truly disturbing. But that does not matter - one wants to imitate Japan!
This is clearly absurd, because there is no room on the planet for more
Japan! So it suffices to make the children work under discipline without
concern for their affective problems, their social relations, their creati-
vity, etc. That's the new socialism! The socialism ofthe people of the
ENA (Ecole nationale d'administration) and the Normale Superieure,
who would like to have people working at the mother school as under a
whip. In that context, there is nothing to discuss: such a regression! One
is dealing with technocrats who have never had the slightest idea of
education who then find themselves promoted to Minister of National
Education! And they make their conservative perorations with an author-
ity that former reactionary governments never had; they believe they have
popular legitimacy, because a certain number of factions of the teacher's
union, as you well know, support them.
126 A Discursive Interlude
JP - Could we return to a notion at once seductive, important, and not
always easy to grasp: that of the machine. For it seems to me that this
essential concept is related to what you have elaborated concerning
subjectivity and what you call from time to time micro-political assemb-
lages. Where are you with respect to this theory of machines defined as
" desiring"?
FG - They are not only desiring! And note that I am not the only one who
has expanded the use of the notion of machine: biologists and mathemati-
cians have also done so. It is completely insufficient to only think of the
machine in technical terms; before being technical, the machine is diag-
rammatic (in the sense of the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce), which
is to say, inhabited by diagrams, plans, equations, etc. The Concorde, for
example, is not only made of steel, aluminum, electrical wires if one
only retains the weights of steel and aluminum, that does not get very far!
In particular, that does not allow flight through economic space and the
space of desire. Besides, and in articulation with the technical, chemi-
cal and biological machines, it is necessary to admit the existence of
machines that I call semiotic or diagrammatic, of theoretical and abstract
machines, not to mention economic and political machines, etc. For
example, think of the Apollo program inaugurated by President Kennedy;
without the will and the political machine supporting that program, the
engine would have never seen the light of day! Without the slightly crazy
desire, not only of Kennedy, but of generations that had dreamt of going
to the moon, the machine would never have taken off. All this is to say that
a technical machine of that sort indeed engages machines that are semi-
otic, economic, political, institutional (the Air Force and the Army were
not in accord with the delegation of this project to NASA). If one does not
want to fall into a childish naturalism opposing nature and culture,
infrastructure to superstructure, if one really wants to describe how his-
toric mutations operate, it seems to me necessary to develop expanded
concepts of the machine that account for what it is in all its aspects. There
are visible synchronic dimensions, but also diachronic virtual dimensions:
a machine is something that situates itself at the limit of a series of anterior
machines and which throws out the evolutionary phylum for machines to
come; it is thus a material and semiotic assemblage which has the virtue
of traversing, not only time and space, but also extremely diverse levels of
existence concerning as much the brain as biology, sentiments, collective
investments.
JP - Do you think that, today, this would be a work which would only try
to locate, to some degree, the machinic structures, the machinic phylum?
But where is one placed in that new kind of reading when one poses the
question: how can one militate within the actual problematic as its stands
today?
Institutional Practice and Politics 127
FG - Militate, or simply have a social practice? Many people try to
persuade us otherwise. For example, for Baudrillard it is not even certain
that the social has ever existed! In any case, it seems evident to him that
there isn't one any longer, or only in the form of a lure. However, I don't
believe this. The social exists more than ever. And even without making
the infrastructure out of other forms of subjectivity, that remains a big
piece! But it is true that different political and social enunciators have
completely collapsed. However, that is not to say that there is no longer
any social practice possible. All that one can conclude is that previous
social practices, those of syndicalism and various grist of the parties of
the left, have completely failed!
The consequence to be drawn from this is that one must air social
practices that respond to very complex actual conditions. A militant
practice precisely must not separate the social from the political and the
economic. I think that, today, the existence of parties like the socialist
party and the communist party has become a historical absurdity. One
can no longer mistake in that way the interactions between the political
level and everyday life, the inter-individual relations and the social rela-
tions on a greater scale. All that overlaps constantly. Today, one does not
change National Education if one does not at the same time change the
micro-social relations of the school, etc. - the mentalities, the relations of
knowledge, the relations to bodies, to music.
JP - That social practice of which you speak is a practice of intersection.
FG - These social practices can no longer circumscribe themselves into
clearly delimited collections, as were the old social classes. New subjec-
less (for example"tbO-Seof the
conditi9ns of women, oL.cl!ildren, of those "without guarantee" from
ethnic transmigrations, of national aspirations - Irish, Bas-
ques, Corsican, etc.). They do not square well with national spaces, and
rarely with regional spaces. Further, the "North-South" problems inter-
sect, without coincidence, with relations of class. An entire transcultural
society shows its profile (hence the rise in racism). These social practices
must also take account of the aberrant relations of force along the axis of
East-West: the cleavage between societies called socialist and societies
called capitalist has become completely artificial, and we have not yet
well grasped the major complicity that exists between American, Soviet,
Chinese, European and others, to maintain the segregative pyramid on
which planetary capitalism rests (I call it "Integrated World Capita-
lism"). In sum, one must no longer think of political practice in terms of
East-West relations or North-South relations, but rather link it to social
it falls on us to invent in th(! transyerse relations between
.the -levels whkh. I have just invoke <;i. It seems particularly urgent to
redefine the objectives of struggle relative to salaried labor; all the old
128 A Discursive Interlude
corporate demands tend to be overtaken by the fact of the setting up of
machinic networks for the production of information. It is no longer a
question of agreeing on a base salary, but a minimum social guarantee
which takes into account the irreversibly rising mass of the "non-guaran-
teed" of society: marginal workers, the unemployed, the future unem-
ployed, the chronically marginalized, etc. An entire conception of work
and of the nobility of professional work is completely falsified by the
evolution of the relations of production.
JP - I return to that notion of the machine. It seems to me that there has
been a tendency, within intellectual opinion, to draw the Anti-Oedipus in
the direction of a theory of desire precisely in opposition to a theory of
the system, whereby, instead, desire defines itself within the actual
system and only appears as something problematic, related in one way or
another to the breaking down of that system. Is it not the case that the
history of that desiring machine is fmnly rooted in that system?
FG - For the most part, the intellectuals in question have not read, or do
nor want to understand, what was said in the post-68 period. Our
f conception of desire was completely contrary to some ode to spontaneity
I or an eulogy to some unruly iiberation. - to
\ "underline artIficial, "constructivist"
\ It as "machinic", which is to say, articulated with the most actual, the
"urgent" mac1iinic types. That is to say, we are far from
'far from orgone energy.
JP - Where do you stand now it propos everything you wrote with respect
to that conception of desire as
FG - I have not changed, it is always a question of the same thing: that
question really should be asked to others.
JP - Still within that conception, then.
FG - People presented us as saying things that were completely ludicrous
which they assumed in advance: complete liberty under the stars, outside
any social regulation! This is a projection in keeping with prevalent ideas
of that time.
JP - Don't you continue to some degree, but not in the same manner, in
The Molecular Revolution: you end by bringing into relief that desire is on
the side of minorities?
FG - Desire appears to me as a of singularization, as a point of
proliferation and of possible creation at the heart of a constituted system.
These processes can pass through stages of marginality, of be comings
that are "becoming-minor" which disengage the nucleus of singularity.
What can all this say about an institution like La Borde? In a period of
time in which everyone was very unhappy, an event sprang forth which,
without being able to know precisely why, changed the atmosphere. An
unexpected process led to the secretion of different universes of refer-
Institutional Practice and Politics 129
ence; one sees things otherwise. Not only does the subjectivity change,
but equally the fields of possibility change, the life projects. For example,
a cook, originally from the Ivory Coast, decided to return there. How-
ever, he had no means to establish himself again in his village. He worked
at La Borde for a number of years and was much loved. A group formed
to help him, which transformed itself into an association in accord with
the law of 1901
3
: "La Borde-Ivoire" They collected twenty thousand
francs to assist him in his move. Later a doctor and a nurse went to visit
him. Then, in tum, a kind of village came to visit La Borde for three
months. Now there is a group of six patients who are going there for three
weeks of vacation. Here we have a process of. institutional
Is this psychotherapy? Good works? Militancy? In each case the local
subjectivity was profoundly modified, latent racism (indeed,
something frequently present in psychotics). Desire is always like that:
someone falls in love with something in a universe that appears closed
and, in a flash, other possibilities are opened. Love, sexuality, are only
means of semiotization of these mutations of desire, modes of inscription
as we used to say. Desire is the fact that where the world was closed there
arises a process which secretes other systems of reference which auth-
orize - but which never guarantee - the opening of new degrees ofliberty.
JP - One of your important propositions speaks of desire within "mole-
cular revolution", that is, desire as bei_ng intergrated with, or making up
a part of, or situated in, the infrastructure.
FG - To say of desire that it makes up part of the infrastructure amounts
to saying that subjectivity produces reality. Subjectivity is not an ideo-
logical superstructure. The old structures of the base, the old territories
of reference, ecological and anthropological, with 'their intrinsic systems
of modelization, have been deterritorialized by the capitalist economy
aqd s_ubjectivity. At present it IS -not, as in archaic societies, that one
becomes someone or something at the end of some deterritorialized
course [cursus], of a local "initiation" It is only universities that still
believe that. Today most people don't know where they are or what they
are. A huge phylum of machinic systems affects them at a certain place -
good or bad is not the question. It is necessary to see that individuated
subjectivity has become the object of a sort of industrial production.
Take the following historical eXli'mple to situate what I am trying to say.
Two countries came out of the Second World War completely destroyed:
Germany and Japan. They were not only physically crushed under the
bombs, like Bremen, they were socially and psychologically devastated
and, beyond that, cruelly occupied. From that two economic "miracles"
resulted. And, paradoxically, these countries had practically no raw
materials or capital reserves. But they reconstituted a prodigious "capital
of subjectivity" (capital of knowledge, of collective intelligence, of will to
130 A Discursive Interlude
survive). In fact, they invented new types of subjectivity out of that same
devastation. The Japanese in particular recovered archaic elements of
their subjectivity and converted them into the most "advanced" forms of
social and material production. One can see clearly that this mode of the
production of subjectivity was infrastructural, if I may say so (because, I
repeat, it is not any more "infra" than "supra" - these are lame concepts,
and it is somewhat of a provocation that I say that). There is a sort of
complex of subjectivity production which allowed the release of a
multitude of creative processes, some of which are hyper-alienating.
Such examples show that there is not a biological, energetic [pulsionnelle],
economic, geopolitical base on which is established, necessarily, a super-
structural subjectivity. Subjectivity can find itself at the base of the
assemblages in question. It is these forms of subjectivity that most
governments run up against today. Nationalist questions infect the capi-
talist system in the West and the East. These go under the names of the
Palestinian problem, the Basque problem, the Black problem, the Polish
problem, the Jewish problem, Afganistan. Governments, in theory,
have all the means to bring to these problems rational solutions. But
that implies neutralizing the resistance of a collective subjectivity, to
convert it into a "subjectivity of equivalence", in which each individual,
each function, each thought, each sentiment is standardized as in a set
of Lego. And there are places where that does not work, because sub-
jectivity is not only produced by capitalist machines, but also by you
and I, in our institutions, in the family, sometimes alone. It is inscribed
in a desire, a novel, a voyage, etc. . It is the main event (grande
affaire] !
JP - It is the main thing (grande chose] which also changes labor.
FG - Yes, it transforms all perspectives. As soon as one takes account of
that singularization of desire as an essential component of the present
crisis, one can no longer view things in the same way as the "current
managers" of the economy. In the name of crisis, one intimates the order
for arranging the cloakroom of the problems of our schools, of urban life,
of social changes, etc. One would, thereby, solve the economic prob-
lem! The problem of desire is never for today The theme of 68:
"We desire everything, now" was certainly poorly formulated, confused,
or whatever you want to call it. But one must say that, on many points,
it remains absolutely relevant. We want everything - that is another way
of saying that it is urgent that we take account of the economy of desire.
It is now, without delay, that we must construct a multi-racial society in
France, and another form of sociality and citizenship. There will be
needed ten million more immigrants in France to meet the future. I'm
not the only one saying this, it is serious people, demographers. Without
such an "importation" (and I apologize for the ugliness of the expression)
Institutional Practice and Politics 131
in twenty years France will be a power of the tenth order. But what is it
that resists understanding that? What is it that engenders the collective
stupidity of a Le Pen? The fact that all the factors of alterity, all the
factors of singularization, are systematically extinguished, falling back on
social "normality" and the conformity of standard models. A small child
sees a person of black or yellow skin in the street. That "interpellates" the
child as they say? But how does he manage that singularity which is
constituted in him? With the assistance of whom? In what context? There
will be a massive rejection if he has been conditioned to negate anything
that is different, anything that exceeds the norm. So, this becomes a
problem that is not only that of black or yellow skin, but more generally
of the type who limps, who has a strange nose or a strangely shaped
mouth, or is old., A racism against the old has developed in our societies.
Normal people - they are what we see on television (for example women
announcers - but it is no longer necessary that they are beautiful!). It is
necessary to keep aiterity in its place [creneau]: the place of average
infantilization. But infants, precisely they are the ones who are able to
assume difference and singularity. It is the dominant adulthood that
constitutes the royal road of puerilisation.
JP - Precisely the desire to do what you propose is a certain kind of
decoding, an act of becoming aware [pn"se de conscience] in the Sartrean
sense. Have you ever had the desire to generalize this type of machinic
militantism, this type of work on singularization?
FG - From 1964 to 1968 there was an effort to expand with the revue
Recherches and the FGERI (Federation des groupes d'etudes et de recherches
institutionnelles). It was a pleasant surprise to discover at which point
people whom we did not know - economists, architects, educators - were
interested in these thematics. We discussed institutional pedagogy, in-
stitutional psychology, the question of women, the media, etc. Then
there was 1968, and everything overflowed. There was nothing to analyze
and to manage in any precise way in all ofthat. We were carried along by
events, the slogans that were coined, and the splinter groups. But as the
song says, "Je ne regrette rien"! I learned more things in two months than
in twenty years. Since, conservatives of every kind believe they have
re-established control of the situation. It is relatively true in most of the
developed nations. However, in Latin America and in Mrica nothing is
played out. We have entered into a kind of masked war [guerre larvee]
between the North and the South. What is in question is the final
principle of development; how is one going to manage life on the planet,
and not only material life, but social life, the desire to live, the desire to
create History is not linear, that's all you can say. One can expect the
worst as well as the most surprising recurrences ...
JP - As relevant as ever ...
132 A Discursive Interlude
FG - That is my conviction. But someone seems like they're cracked
when they say such things!
JP - That brings to mind a question: is schizoanalysis a method? Where
would you place it in relation to what you have just said?
FG - What seems important to me is the introduction of a certain
number of fundamental dimensions relative to singularities, to processes
of singularization. If you do not introduce that analytic dimension con-
cerning the invention of subjectivity at the heart of social practice,
whether it concerns political or union struggles, or everyday struggles,
ecological or other struggles, then there is failure and guaranteed
demoralization. Happily, there are people who have begun to realize this.
Note the strength of the Greens in Germany who now have acquired
important arbitrating power in certain relations of political power.
There is, perhaps, a new alliance in the process of formation among
those who refuse to see the forests destroyed, immigrants treated as
cattle, huge amounts of money devoured by military budgets, which is to
say, among the Greens, and other alternative parties, and the revolu-
tionaries. In my opinion, it is the only hope of escaping the present
impasse.
With respect to schizo analysis in all that, it is clear that it cannot pose
itself as a general method which would embrace the ensemble of prob-
lems and new social practices. It is more a matter of a theoretico-pract-
ical reflection concerned above all, for now, with institutional fields,
shrinks, and others. Without pretending to promote a didactic program,
it is a matter of constituting networks and rhizomes in order to escape the
systems of modelization in which we are entangled and which are in the
process of completely polluting us, head and heart. The old psychoana-
lytic references (mechanistic and/or structuralist), the systemic refer-
ences that spread like an epidemic, the residues of dogmatic Marxism,
continue to obstruct our ability to develop new analytic-militant carto-
graphies. The debates around quelling all these "maladies" of theory are
not a light affair!
At base, schizo analysis only poses one question: "how does one model
oneseIr'? You are psychotic and you construct idiosyncratic references;
you are attached as with a ball and chain to a familial-oedipal territory;
you stick to the collective apparatus - for instance, National Education -
as if it concerned your ethnicity Each time the scene changes, so do
the protagonists and the myths of reference. One day, instead of going to
the office, you stay in bed and tum yourself into a beetle. Perhaps you
have some genius and you write The Metamorphosis! Sometimes life
changes because of something very simple, a mini-revolution. Other
times it requires a hyper-sophisticated disposition. Everything is
possible! Nothing is mechanical, structural, but nothing is guaranteed:
InstitutWnal Practice and Politics 133
no interpretation, no analytic qualification - like the "cure-type" - sup-
plies the ticket to change life and liberate desire!
Schizoanalysis, I repeat, is not an alternative modelization. It is a
meta-modelization. It tries to understand how it is that you got where
you are? "What is your model to you"? It does not work? - Then, I don't
know, one tries to work together. One must see if one can make a graft
of other models. It will be perhaps better, perhaps worse. We will see.
There is no question of posing a standard model. And the criterion of
truth in this comes precisely when the meta-modelization transforms
itself into auto-modelization, or auto-gestation, if you prefer.
JP - So, at the limit, that would be a practice like the one Tosquelles
evokes in a text: doctor-workers who establish points of connection,
working with this and that [bricolent]
FG Yes, indeed. But when you say these kinds of things in the
distinguished world of psychoanalysis, they call you a social assistant:
"That is not analysis"! - "Indeed, you make them a gift of it"! But.this is
unfonunate. For an analysis of the formations of the unconscious that
has done with the reductionist traps offamilialism and logocentrism and
which opens itself to all possible forms of exploration, to all the arbitrary
points of semiotic conjunction, is not bad at all. Don't you agree?
Moreover, this implies theoretical approaches that are complex enough
to take account of transferences of subjectivity from one domain to
another and transformations of systems of sense among diverse semiotic
components. For instance, how can an economic relation influence an
obsessional syndrome? It is not simple. Partial objects and the signifier
are not sufficient. It is necessary to try to register, through a concrete
cartography of the assemblages of enunciation, how the phenomena of
the planes of consistency are jumped, what are the semiotic systems that
allow passage from the world of recognized significations to the world of
a-signifying ritornellos constitutive of new existential territories? It is also
necessary to be suspicious of master concepts, like that of sexuality. The
sexuality of puberty is not of the same nature as the sexuality of an adult.
No general category of libido traverses them. They constitute themselves
as radically different modes of composition, the one and the other, and
they never communicate by any pathways of direct causality.
JP - But then, doesn't one arrive at some sort of idea of a technician
who, effectively, through certain competencies, would be a schizo ana-
Iyst?
FG The ideology of 68 would require that it is necessary for the
"therapy" technicians to abandon all responsibility. But things being as
they are, and the production of subjectivity being what it is, it is evident
that one cannot imagine that the "users" could reappropriate that re-
sponsibility without some other process. Social workers exist, teachers,
134 A Discursive Interlude
care givers, etc. The question is not to eliminate them, but to rearrange
their position in such a way that their knowledge capital and their
transferential potentialities are not manifest to the credit of perverse
functions of power. Is it that one must only direct and apply a scientific
knowledge, or is it, on the contrary, that one must refute any scientific
qualification of this knowledge, which in reality is only efficacious in the
singular procedures of analytic cartography? And, I repeat, the analytic
map can no longer be distinguished from the existential territory that it
engenders. The object of knowledge and the subject of enunciation
coincide in this kind of assemblage. That notion of scientificity, and the
use that is made of it in the so-called human sciences, must be examined
in the light of the work of Kuhn on the relativity of the paradigms of
knowledge in the realm of "hard" sciences. Theoreticians, technicians,
creative people, recipients of welfare, and the agents of the state are so
many components of the assemblages of production of subjectivity. Each
of these poses the question of the micro-political - and thus not at all
scientific character of their practical options. If it is true that the
production of subjectivity has become the great issue of our time, then it
is these people in society who hold the privileged position of the potential
decision makers with respect to a number of choices of our society - a
place which was earlier occupied by the classes of industrial workers and
before that by the urban bourgeoisie and secular clergy.
JP - The circle closes - but I still have one question. Don't you think,
precisely in light of the extremely dialectical manner in which all this is
described, that there is something very complex here with all these
references to abstract machines? Don't you think that all these concep-
tions of "therapy" are somewhat imprisoned in a formalism? This semi-
otic scaffolding, the machinic unconscious, through all this vocabulary
that isn't always easy to navigate, is it possible to get to the heart of the
subject, outside this formalization, or is it necessary to pass through all
these apparatuses?
FG - Certainly not - when I call this scaffolding, I really mean scaffold-
ing.
JP - What is this scaffolding?
FG - It could be - sadly it isn't -like a work of art. What is best in Freud
is his literary dimension.
JP - There isn't a search for the fundamental machine or the fundamen-
tal equation?
FG - In what concerns me, absolutely not!
JP - One can at certain moments - I have felt it, being myself from time
totime pursued by that intoxication - come to discover the matrix, the
transversal matrix, which allows one to operate within the different fields
that you have mentioned.
Institutional Practice and Politics 135
FG - That was my own cartographic problem when I was young - I was
caught up by the different fields. I said to myself, I must try to reconnect
everything somewhat. But that did not become "The Five Lessons of
Schizoanalysis", or "The Three Essays on Desiring Machines" Certainly
not!
JP - Do you still maintain an analytic practice now?
FG - Yes, I pursue an analytic practice on an individual basis and with
myself. But I do not separate that practice from my intervention in a
number of groups and institutions.
JP - Do you think that today - and it is something that can be asked of
the present as it was asked in 68 - one can still work within institutions?
FG - One does not have a choice! Not to work in institutions - what
would that mean?, An analyst who received patients in his office is in an
institution, a splintered institution, but an institution that has strong
links in the "public" mind, in the mind of doctors, in the mind of the
media; it is still a particularly formidable form of institution.
JP - I am convinced of that.
FG - At base, the individual is nothing but the intersection of institu-
tional components. Even dreams are institutional, branching into films
and televisual sequences; all of this is institutional!
JP - It is for this reason that you react in relation to Milner as you do.
You have always defended active methods and social innova-
tions. Today nobody gives a damn. And it is true that such work does
not reach the point of developing itself, that it remains within that order
of being parceled out, of being splintered.
FG - There are two ways of thinking of innovative experiments like those
of Freinet, Fernand Oury, Gaby Cohn-Bendit. Either one considers
them uniquely in their contingency, either their partial consequences,
their often limited discourses, their restricted range, or one considers
them as problematics which are forever taken up again, forever reworked.
That is an abstract machinic phylum. If a true mutation appears, if a new
way of discerning a problem establishes itself - for example, the necessity
of receiving, in an analytic mode, an individual or collective symptom in
a school class - then the mudd lings of Chevenement mean nothing, the
new truth will exert its own pressure. One day, even if in China, it will
re-emerge. I say that because a popular student from China just made a
request for a restdency at La Borde.
JP That is perhaps how it must come to pass. It cannot happen
otherwise because each time there is a displacement which is within the
order of desire. But I want to return to a question: what are the pragmatic
ends [finalizes] of this technician of schizoanalysis?
FG - There could never be a technician of schizoanalysis - that is a
contradiction in terms. If schizoanalysis must exist, it is because it exists
136 A Discursive Interlude
everywhere, and not only in schizophrenics, but in the schizzes, the lines
of flight, the processual ruptures that are taken up by a cartographic self-
mending. Its end? One can say that there isn't one, because it is no longer
the end that matters but the "milieu", the process becoming processual
[Ie processus en train de se processualiser]. This implies a sort of blind
confidence in the process of deterritorialization. When you engage in a
project, for example, an institutional project, or a film or novel, you can
internalize a pre-existing model (the Stendhalian novel or film of Marcel
Lherbier). One aims at a consummate object against which one can
measure the ends and the means. With schizoanalysis it is the inverse.
One no longer wants to make a definite object. One does not want to
enter into a pre-established program. One tries to live the field of the
possible that is carried along by the assemblages of enunciation. You
begin a novel, but you do not know how it is going to finish; perhaps it
will not even be called a novel. But precisely that would be an analytic
process; you throw yourself into an analysis without knowing what you
are going to find. It is precisely that notion of process that to me is
fundamental. One abandons the idea that one must seek to master an
object or a subject - I am no longer "either master of myself or master of
the universe"
One introduces into analytic research a dimension of finitude, of
singularity, of existential delimitation, of precariousness in relation to
time and values. When one has filled one's head with the notion that one
is immortal in some manner, that one can fix objects and hold them -
that is at bottom a folly, a folly that is often murderous. Ethical decenter-
ing and micro-politics imply a complete reversal in relation to the exist-
ing system of education. This is not to say that the ends are effaced by
the means, because the formula itself is broken: there are no longer either
ends or means, there are only processes, processes of auto-construction
of life, auto-construction of the world, with mutant effects that are new,
unexpected, unheard of. If everything is inscribed in advance, so it is
immediately destroyed! There is no point in seeing the end of the film -
you know it already!
JP - What is strange is that one would place one's belief paradoxically in
something idealist; while that changes perspectives, I believe there is
something very materialist in what you have said, but that is not evident
for our frame of mind.
FG - What is idealist - in the good sense of idealist - is to believe that
one can effect the course of things by virtue of an ideal engagement.
There is no destiny inscribed in the infrastructure. Capitalist societies
construct a society, secrete a subjectivity which is in no way natural or
necessary. Certainly one could do something else. What is insupportable
to me is the idea of an inevitable programmatic necessity. One thinks that
Institutional Practice and Politics 137
history is programmed like a computer. Mitterand had the same econ-
omic politics as Barre because he believed, at bottom, that it was the only
politics possible. That is a horror! The system programs itself on its own
by systematically deforming all singularities, all the things of life, all that
which, in appearance, is of no use for anything. Whether you are happy,
whether you stutter, whether you are afraid of death or of old age - all
this counts for nothing. That is modern capitalism: desire, madness,
gratuitousness - all this counts for nothing! On the contrary, it incon-
veniences. It makes too much "noise" in the sense of information theory.
JP - Concretely, how does one organize institutional practices given
this?
FG - Trick question par excellence! I have just been trying to explain to
you that there is no protocol, no model, and you ask me for a method of
application. Offer me a concrete situation, tell me how it is constructed,
what relations of ''incarnation'' you maintain with it. Inasmuch as I
would be hooked by your proposal, that I would want to interest myself
a little more in it, and - why not - go along with it, the question changes
its nature. It consists in marking the indicative elements, the experienced
sequences of non-sense as a symptom, as institutional lapses which,
instead of being pushed to the side, marginalized, will see themselves
confer a field of expressions, a gamut of possibilities that they did not
have before. From that, and in association with the diverse interlocutors
concerned, another processual cartography of unconscious formations of
this field of subjectivity perhaps becomes possible. There, where there
exists a univocal expression, a polyphony of enunciation will affirm itself.
For me, that is to "work the unconscious". It is not simply to discover it,
but first and before all else to lead it to produce its own lines of
singularity, its own cartography, in fact, its own existence. In brief, there
is no recipe!
JP - Between us, one could say that one falls back on classical institu-
tional practices.
FG - Believe me that I have never claimed anything to the contrary! But
one must add that current institutional practice - non-analytic - often
lacks the interpretation of singularities. There is often an overlap of
collective assemblages and group practices. For me this is quite different.
The silence of a catatonic can make up a part, perhaps even constitute
the masterpiece, of an institutional assemblage of enunciation! All of the
pre-personal dimension of singUlarities is too often separated from the
group dimensions. What is interesting in the theoretico-practical devel-
opments of Oury and Tosquelles is that they always endeavoured to
make a place for non-sense, for institutional signifiance, for the empty
word [/a parole vide] or for what Lacan saw with his generalized theory of
the partial object (objet a).
138 A Discursive Interlude
Notes
This uncdited interview was published in Jean Oury, ~ l i x Guattari, Frant,;ois TosqueUes,
Pratique tkl'inslituhonnelllr poliliqull. Collection propose par Jacqucs Pain (Vigneux: Matrice,
1985). pp 45--83. Jacqucs Pain teaches at Universite de Paris X, at Nantcrre.
1 The linguist Jean-Claude Milner wrote a widcly read and controversial book entitled
De l'Ecole (Paris: Seuil, 1984).
2 Jean-Pierre Chcvencment was Minister of (National] Education from 1984-86.
3 The law of 1 juiUet 1901 permits anyone, including psychiatric inmates, to form an
association in order to accomplish a social goal.
Transioud by Lang Baker
PART IV
Polysemiosis
12
Semiological Subjection, Semiotic
Enslavement
l
What is the crystallization of power in the field of linguistics? One will
understand nothing of this question if power is represented exclusively as
an ideological superstructure. Power is not something that only concerns
well defined social wholes or r o ~ p s A power formation binds more than
"human communication" It implicates as well an entire complex of
"extra-human" semiotic machines. It is also the power of the ego and the
power of the super-ego, that which makes one stammer from fear, that
which generates somatic reactions, neuroses, suicides, etc. The stability
of a "state of language" corresponds to an equilibrium between these
diverse levels of power. But each level does not situate itself in relation to
the others in any old way. Here, again, we are not dealing with amor-
phous matter. One cannot account for the stabilization of a "stratum of
competence" except by articulating the precise make-up of domains as
different as these:
individual, human acts of semiotization (from internal perceptions
all the way to mass media communications);
semiotic operations relative to social machines, economic ma-
chines, technical machines, scientific machines, etc.;
machinic indices and abstract machines (concerning the machinic
phylum and the plane of consistency);
systems that allow correspondences amongst the preceding do-
mains (deterritorializing lines of flight, components of passage,
etc.).
We have seen that a clear-cut opposition between competence-perfor-
mance, apart from neutralizing the foundations of language, squeezes
2
the collective assemblages of enunciation - that is to say, the true parties
of creation as far as language is concerned for the benefit of an
alternative: individualized subjectivity or universal subjectivity. But one
can agree with the position of psycholinguists such as T.G. Bever who
142 Polysemiosis
consider judgements of grammaticality "comportments like any other"3
without, however, succumbing to the shortcomings of a systematic "psy-
chologization" of linguistics. The point is not to deny the systemic
characteristics of the modes of signifying grammaticalization that have
assured themselves, for example, an overall control of capitalist prag-
matic fields, but only to reject the abstract categorizations upon which
some pretend to found them. We are, in fact, in the presence of the same
type of retroactive universalizing process used by all power formations
that have wanted to give themselves the appearance of a divine legitim-
acy, and, in particular, those that have sought to "justify" the expansion-
ism of capitalism. From the fact that performances, of the monetary,
linguistic, and musical types, for example, can always be "structu-
ralized", made discursive and binary, one comes, then, to consider them
as having always and already been there in full force, to believe that their
elements carry in their seeds the creation of the form of Capital, of the
Signifier, of Music, etc. But the real processes of power and the machinic
mutations that have fixed and stabilized a form, developed and delimited
a set of creative potentialities or metastable equilibria amongst assemb-
lages, are themselves absolutely indestructibk. Abstract machines can al-
ways be complicated but they can never be broken down without losing
their mutational specificity. So one must take them in their entirety. It is
impossible to reach them piece by piece, through learning or condition-
ing. They cling to each other, every part of them becoming a process.
They assimilate themselves into an assemblage and change its "destiny"
Or they silence themselves and return to a plane of pure machinic
virtuality.
Pragmatic fields of power formations, prior to their stabilization under
the forms of language, dialectics, etc., must first be "experimented on"
in the name of collective performance: all the intermediaries, all the
degrees of fluidity, are thus conceivable in the course of an individual
semiotic performance, be it marginal or even delirious, up to the com-
pletely sclerotic encodings of the standard dictionary, academic gram-
mar, religious or political credos, etc. Their efficiency depends on the
dominant type of semiotization which they put into place and, in particu-
lar, on whether or not the diagrammatic components activate certain
abstract machines (financial, scientific, artistic, etc.). Pragmatic micro-
politics concerns semiotic assemblages overflowing from all sides - from
the side of the "infra" towards corporeal intensities, and from the side of
the "supra" towards the socius - personologicallinguistics.
4
The crystal-
lization of signifying powers corresponds to a particular mode of the
libido's overcoding:
- through semiological subjection at the heart of fields of resonance;
Semiological Subjection, Semwtic Enslavement 143
through semiotic enslav;ement at the heart of fields of interaction
amongst machinic redundancies.
The abstract machinic level of a signifying assemblage is specified by
the fact that it assures the congruence of its two types of encoding and
that it directs the instauration of:
the imperatives of the dominant grammaticality of expression (the
redundancy of a-signifying figures of expression);
"ideological" assemblages of semiological subjectwn at the level of
content (redundancies of resonance);
diagrammatical assemblages of enslavement of decoded capitalist
flows at the level ofthe "referent": the flow of abstract labor as the
essence of exchange value; the flow of monetary signs as the
expressive substance of Capital; the flow of syntagmatic and para-
digmatic linguistic signs adapted to standardized interpersonal
communications, etc.
The normatized agents of production are set in motion before the
transformation of each individual into a speaker-listener capable of
adopting a linguistic comportment compatible with the modes of com-
petence that assign to one a particular position in society and in produc-
tion. The components of semiotic enslavement constitute, in reality, the
fundamental tools that permit the dominant classes their assurance of
power over the agents of production. The "miracle" of capitalism is that
it manages to direct language, as it is spoken, as it is taught, as it is
televised, as it dreams, etc., in such a way that it remains perfectly
adapted to its own evolution. Furthermore, this operation always appears
to be self-evident: the sy_ntagms of power, its presuppositions, its threats,
its modes of intimidation, of seduction and of submission, are conveyed
at an unconscious level, a little like the "clandestine" images that adver-
tisers insert into a film. If there is an urgency that compels a febrile search
for a new model of the unconscious, such a phenomenon must be
accounted for! Reject the idea that the syntactic markers of capitalist
languages express the fundamental requirements of the human condi-
tion; consider these markers, on the contrary, to be the result of a field of
semiological transformations established by a system of power less and
less tolerant of modes of intrinsic coding. These seemingly harmless
moves singularly exceed the traditional scope of linguistics and semi-
otics!
The totality of machines, be they social, technical, desiring, etc., can
no longer escape from the overcoding of the signifying machines of the
144 Polysemwsis
State. In fact, the signifying power of national languages and the multi-
form power of States and of the network of collective assemblages tend
to coincide. The molecular links of expression substitute for the ancient
segmentary structures ofthe socius to constitute a homogeneous plane of
content that conveys at the same time the categorical imperative of the
Kantian moral law, the "necessities" of class conscience, the demands of
custom and the repressive habits of the majoritarian consensus, and, on
top of this, the persecuting themes of the ambient super-ego. It is by the
exhaustion of this plane that the intensities of desire detach from their
ancient territories and receive their subject-object polarities. Mediatized
and controlled, they become social need, demand, necessity and sub-
mission. They exist no longer except to the degree that their expression
resonates with mass-mediatized significations. Or they withdraw into
themselves, translate themselves, that is to say, renounce their character
of nomadic flux.
There is no doubt that the threat of a seizure of power by a decoded
flux exists prior to capitalism and already in the most "primitive" so-
cieties (in this regard it is appropriate to distinguish, amongst these
latter, between what Pierre Clastres called societies with a State and
societies without a State, as they do not share the same attitude to the
"defense" against an eventual accumulation of power in a State appara-
tus
5
). There is no doubt that ancient societies were already traversed,
strictly speaking, by the capitalist flows that they were trying so hard to
master! But one must admit that a series of causes, circumstances, and
accidents peculiar to the Middle Ages and the Western "Renaissance"
resulted in the social structures losing definitively a certain type of
control of the decoded flows and engaging in a kind of generalized
Baroque style - economic, political, religious, aesthetic, scientific, etc.
leading to capitalist societies in the proper sense.
The semiotic and machinic enslavement of desiring flows and the
semiological subjection on which capitalist societies rest are established
in reaction to an uncontrollable dispersion of territorialized codes. They
are the correlatives of the installation of new types of divisions between
the sexes, the generations, the divisions of labor, the relations of social
segmentarities, etc. A new use of languages, signs, and icons leads to a
state of affairs in which the least effect of meaning - even the most
intimate, the most unconscious - falls under the control of social hierar-
chies. Capitalist powers never cease "rethinking" in detail each significa-
tive relation, differentiating and specifying each semiological "allocation"
During the course of an apprenticeship in language, a child will be called
upon, for example, to model its first infinitive intensives
6
in such a way
as to put them into the service of pragmatic predicatives and fundamental
deictic strategies of power (encodings of hierarchical position, role per-
SemiokJgical Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement 145
mutability, sexual division, etc.). "Becoming sexed-body" will be fixed in
its relation with "becoming social-body" by the regime of pronominality
and the genres which axiomatize the subjective positions of feminine
alienation. Despite appearances, in a pragmatic capitalist field the differ-
ent social categories of an identical linguistic community men,
women,? children, the elderly, people in rural areas, immigrants, etc. - do
not speak the same language.
National languages, those which are spoken at the Academie
or on television, are metalanguages. Their "distance" in relation to the
languages of the land, the arbitrary forcefulness of their overcoding, are
the guarantors of their efficiency and, paradoxically, of their degree of
interiorization. This semiological economy of power and its implications
for modes of generation, of the transformation of syntactic components,
lexicals, morpho-phonological and prosodic elements of language, is the
foundation for even the pragmatic fields of enunciation, which Oswald
Ducrot designated as the "polemical value" (in the etymological sense)
of language.
To Return, or To Detour, By Way of Hjelmslev?
The systematic ignorance of society and politics characteristic of current
linguistics and semiotics can only be smashed by caIling into question or
dismembering their basic categories. From this point of view, a return to
Louis Hjelmslev, or perhaps a detour by way of Hjelmslev, will be useful.
The issue is not to recapture or resume his project of a radical axiomati-
zation of language but to start up again from those categories which
appear to be the result of a truly rigorous examination of the totality of
the semiotic problematic. This means drawing out in particular all the
consequences of his calling into question of the status of content and
expression. "The terms expression plane and content plane and, for that
matter, expression and content are chosen in conformity with established
notions and are quite arbitrary. Their functional definition provides no
justification for calling one, and not the other, of these entities expression,
or one, and not the other, content. They are defined only by their mutual
solidarity, and neither of them can be identified otherwise. They are each
defined only oppositively, as mutually opposed functives of one and the
same function".8
It is regrettable that the Hjelmslevian expression-content pair coin-
cides in fact with the Saussurian signifier-signified couple, which has in
effect made the totality of semiotics fall back upon a dependency on
linguistics.
9
Be that as it may, at the most essential level of what g1osse-
maticians call the "semiotic function", the form of expression and the
146 Polysemwsis
form of content contract themselves to constitute a "solidarity" that
radically relativizes the classic opposition between signifier-signified. 10
This opposition only recovers its law at the level of substances, in
knowing the sens [purpon) of content and the sens [purport] of express-
ion. This must lead us, of course, to give up envisaging the existence of
forms, except as they are manifested or put into action by panicular
substances. This point is paramount because, as I have tried to show, it
is only by staning from non-linguistic - or non-signifying linguistic -
semiotic assemblages, that these substances may be produced: in other
words, "before" the constitution of significative redundancies and with-
out that which would confer to them a status of priority or hierarchical
superiority vis-a-vis other semiotic productions (symbolic, diagram-
matic, etc.).
By semiotizing the most diverse base matter this solidarity or con-
gruence of forms - which coincides here with the abstract machinism of
language
ll
- constitutes substances of expression and content. In this
way the formalism of substances rises in tiers upon the matter which
must be, as Hjelmslev emphasizes, "scientifically formed" - at least to a
sufficient degree to allow these substances to be "semiotically
formed",,2 Finally, let us remember that the distinction this author
established between the system and the process of syntagmatization does
not imply that this latter remains captive to autonomous form. No form
can subsist by itself independently of its process offormation. We do not
have to think of this process in terms of universal codes, sealed off but
indissociable, on the one hand, from the assemblages that they suppon
and, on the other, from the base matter that is put into play (which
Christian Metz has called, following Hjelmslev, the pertinent traits of
matters of expression
13
).
We meet again here the problem of the genesis of formalism. What
confers a creative function on a semiotic component and what removes
it? Languages, as such, do not have any privilege in this domain; in the
name of encodings of normalization they can even slow down or block all
semiotic proliferation, and it often comes back to the non-linguistic
components to catalyze mutations and to break the conformist shell of
dominant linguistic significations. It is neither at the level of formal
unities of content nor at that of the distinctive elementary traits that we
will be able to seize the spring of semiotic creativity, but at the pragmatic
l ~ v l of assemblages of enunciation and .at that of the molecularity of
matters of expression, of abstract machines that they put into place. The
operation of linguistic overcoding of semiotic processes "in a free state",
which tends to reduce them to the state of signifying components or the
dependency of language, consists essentially in the extraction from each
of them of the traits and redundancies recuperable by power formations
Semiological Subjection, Semiotic Enslavement 147
and in neutralizing, repressing and "structuralizing" the others. This
permanent selection, this systematic politics of "good semiotic choice",
assumes not only the existence of the assemblages that produce it but
also the components that manufacture the signs, symbols, indices, and
icons on which it rests.
Notes
This anicle, "Assujettisscment semiologique, asservissement semiotique", is an excerpt
from Chapter 2, "Sonir de la langue", pp. 34-42, of Guattari's L'lnconscient machiniqlU.
I The notion of "enslavement" must be understood here in a cybernetic sense.
2 This tenn appears m-English in the original text.
3 T.G. Bever, (Change, 1972), p. 203.
4 From this perspective, pragmatics must, contrary to the Anglo - American tradition,
cease to be considered as a suburb of syntax and semantics and, contrary to the Franco
-European tradition, as a subset of linguistics. It is, on the contrary, signifying
semiologies that become special cases of a much more general pragmatics.
5 Pierre Clastres, La SOCleu contre l'Etat (Paris: Minuit, 1974). [Society Against the
State, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone, 1987)].
6 The first verbal expressions of a child are, for the past, the past participles ("parti",
"tom be") and for the future the infinitives. The development of periphrases comes
later ("ie vais aller") and lastly, the inflections. C E. Traugott, "Le changement
linguistique et sa relation ill'inquisition de la langue matemelle", Langages 32 (1973),
p.47.
7 Cf. Robin Lakoff, Language and Woman's Place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975).
8 Louis Hjelmslev, Prolegomenes a line tllione du langage (Paris: Minuit, 1968), p. 85.
[Prolegomena To a Theory of Language, trans. Francis J. Whitfield (Madison: Univer-
sity of Wisconsin Press, 1961 and 1969), p. 60]
9 Hjeimslev defines language as a "semiotic into which all other semiotics may be
translated - both all other languages, and all other semiotic structures", ProUgomenes,
p. 109.
10 As Rene Lindekens writes: the semiotic relation of absolute interdependence
characterizes the bond between the planes of expression and content - from which
proceeds the denotative power of sign systems -, and which Hjelmslev calls the relation
of solidarity, must be considered as contracted exclusively by the two fonns, from one
sign plane to the other". Hjelmsltf} (Paris: Hatier, 1975).
11 This expression ofthe linguistic "abstract machine" comes from Chomsky. Cf. Dic,ion-
nain encydopedique des sciences du langage, Oswald Ducrot and Tzvetan Todorov, p. 59.
12 Hjelmslev, Essais linguistiques (Paris: Minuit, 1971), p. 59.
13 Christian Metz, Essa; sur la signification au cinema (Paris: Klincksieck, 1967); Langage
"cwma (paris: Larousse, 1971).
TransJaud by Peter Trnka, with the assistance of Fadi Abou-Rihan
13
The Place of the Signifier in the
Institution
The categories of Louis Hjelmslev will only be taken up here in the effort
to clarify the position of the signifier in the institution. This position was
not identifiable from the classic analytical perspective. Recall that Hjelm-
slev's distinction between expression and content is intersected by a
tripartition between matter, substance and form. We will essentially
emphasize the opposition he established between matter (matter of ex-
pression, matter of content) and the formation of semiotic substances.
What I would like to establish here is that semiologies of signification
function in the four squares of expression and of content that are inter-
sected by substance and form. On the other hand, the semiotics with
which we are confronted, in an institutional context, bring into play two
additional dimensions of non-semiotically formed matter: that is, sens
[purport] I, as matter of expression, and the continuum of material fluxes
as matter of content. This mobilizes the six squares of our table [see
below].
For Hjelmslev a substance is semiotically formed when form is pro-
jected onto matter or sens [purport], "just as an open net casts its shadow
down on an undivided surface".
2
It is well known that the signifying
chains put into play, at the level of the substance of expression, finished
batteries of signs rendered discrete and digitalized whose formal compo-
sitions are linked to the formalization of signified contents. It seems to
me that linguists have too hastily equated Hjelmslev's distinction be-
tween expression and content with that of Saussure's between signifier
and signified. Indeed, the separation between non-semiotically formed
matter and semiotically formed substance, insofar as it is established
independently of the relations of expression and content, opens the way
to the study of semiotics independent of signifying semiologies, that is to
say, of semiotics which, to be precise, would not be based on the
bipolarity of signifier-signifed. Our concern not to crush institutional
semiotics under the weight of signifying semiologies leads us to distin-
guish between them, and to hold them both at a distance from what we
call a-semiotic encodings.
expression
content
Tfle Place of the Signifier in the Institution
matter
semiotically formed
subtances
substance
a - signifying semiotics
149
form
Let's summarize again the classification that we have proposed else-
where on this subject. We will distinguish:
1 A-semiotic encodings: For example: genetic encoding or any type of
so-called natural encoding which functions independently of the
constitution of a semiotic substance. These modes of encoding
formalize the field of material intensities without recourse to an
autonomous and translatable "ecriture" Do not succumb to the
semiotic illusion of projecting an ecriture onto the natural field.
There is no genetic writing. The second vertical column of our
table is therefore not involved.
3
2 Signifying semiologies: These are based upon sign systems, on semi-
otically formed substances which enter into relations of formaliza-
tion on the double plane of content and expression. One can
distinguish two types of signifying semiologies: symbolic semio-
logies and the semiologies of signification:
a Symbolic semiologies: These put into play several types of substan-
ces. For example, in archaic societies: a gestural semiotics, a
semiotics of sign language, a postural semiotics, a semiotics of
inscriptions on the body, a ritual semiotics, etc. The constitution
of the "world" of childhood or the "world" of madness equally put
150 Polysemiosis
into play several decentered semiotic circles which are never com-
pletely translatable into a system of universal signification. Semi-
otic substance therefore retains a certain autonomous territoriality
which will correspond to a certain type of specific jouissance.
b Semiologies of signification: By contrast, all their substances of ex-
pression (sonorous, visual, etc.) are centered on a single signifying
substance. This is the "dictatorship ofthe signifier" The reference
substance can be understood as archi-ecriture, but not in the Derri-
dean way: it is not a matter of an ecriture which would "orginate"
all the semiotic organizations, but of the sudden, historically dated
appearance of writing machines, which is to say of a fundamental
instrument of the great despotic empires.
Writing machines are essentially tied to the institution of the machines
of State power. From the instant when they are put into place, all the
other polycentered semiotic substances become subordinate to the spe-
cific stratum of the signifier. The totalitarian character of this depend-
ency is such that, by an imaginary retrospective effect, it seems "to
originate" all other semiotics from a basis in the signifier. From that
moment, the insistence of the letter in the unconscious becomes fun-
damental, not because it returns to an archetypal ecn'ture, but because it
manifests the permanence of a despotic signifiance which, although it
emerges in specific historical conditions, continues to produce effects
and develop under other conditions as well.
c A-signifying semiotics: These must be distinguished from semio-
logies of signification; it is a question, in short, of post-signifying
semiotics. Examples of a-signifying semiotics would be: a machine
of mathematical signs which lacks the vocation of producing signi-
fications; or an artistic, musical, economic, scientific technico-
semiotic complex; or again, a revolutionary analytic machine.
These a-signifying machines continue to rely on signifying semi-
otics, but they only use them as a tool, as an instrument of semiotic
deterritorialization allowing semiotic fluxes to establish new con-
nections with the most deterritorialized material fluxes. These
connections function independently of whether they signify some-
thing for someone or not. In one respect, Emile Benveniste is
correct to consider that all semiotics depend upon.a signifying
language in order to come into existence. But this correlation does
not at all imply a relation of hierarchization and subjection. It is
not the concern of a physico-chemical theory to propose a mental
representation of the atom or electricity, even though, in order to
express itself, it must continue to have recourse to a language of
The Place of the Signifier in the Institunon 151
significations and icons. It can do without this kind of crutch, but
most of what it brings into play is a certain type of sign machine
which acts as support for abstract machines setting up an assemb-
lage of experimental complexes and theoretical complexes. One
reaches a point where the very distinction between sign machine
and techno-scientific machine ceases to be pertinent; the invention
of a new type of chemical chain or the updating of a microphysical
particle is, as it were, pre-formed by a semiotic production which
determines not only their spatio-temporal coordinates but also
their conditions of existence. With a-signifying semiotics, then, the
relations of production and of reciprocal engenderment between
the semiotic machine and material fluxes are radically reorganized.
The signifying machine was based on the system of representation, that
is, on a production of semiotic redundancy constituting a world of
quasi-objects, icons, analogon, and schema, acting as substitutes for
intensities and real mUltiplicities. The signification-effect which results
from the conjunction of the two formalisms of signifier and signified is
itself caught in a veritable vicious circle in that the semiotic fluxes and the
material fluxes cancel each other out in the field of representation. A
world of dominant signification installs itself on the signifying reterrito-
rializations which result from the self-mutilation of the semiotic ma-
chines constituted by their mono-centering on the signifying machine - a
machine of simulacra and powerlessness. The signifier is deployed on an
autonomous stratum, and it no longer refers to the signified, while the
real is radically separated from semiotic fluxes. A subjectivity individu-
ates itself in the structures of this signifying machine, following the
Lacanian formula that "a signifier represents the subject for another
signifier". It is an ambiguous, duplicitous subjectivity: on its unconscious
side it participates in a process of semiotic deterritorialization which
"works" the linguistic machines and prepares to transform them into
a-signifying semiotic machines, while, on its conscious side, it rests on
reterritorializations of signifiance and interpretance.
This position of the subject changes radically with the foregrounding of
a-signifying semiotics. The world of mental representation (which Frege
opposed to concepts and objects; also called "reference", positioned
between the symbol and the referent at the summit of Ogden and
Richards' triangle) loses, then, its function of centering and of semiotic
overcoding. Signs "work" things prior to representation. Signs and
things combine with one another independently of the subjective "hold"
that the agents of individuated enunciation claim to have over them.
A collective assemblage of enunciation is, then, in a position to relieve
speech of its role as the imaginary support of the cosmos. It substitutes
152 Polysemiosis
for it a collective saying [dire collecli!] that brings together machinic
elements of every kind: human, semiotic, technical, scientific, etc. The
illusion of an enunciation specific to the human subject vanishes, reveal-
ing that it was only an effect adjacent to statements produced and
manipulated by politico-economic systems.
It is generally considered that children, the mad and primitive peoples,
fail to acquire mastery of signifying semiotics, and are forced to express
themselves by "secondary" means such as bodily and gestural expres-
sions, cries, etc. The major disadvantage of these means lies in the fact
that they do not allow the messages which they carry to be translated in
a univocal manner into a linguistic code, generating dominant significa-
tions. This relative untranslatability of diverse semiotic compositions is
attributed either to a deficit, or a fixation at the pre-genital stage, or a
refusal of the law, or a cultural deficiency, or a combination of several of
these elements. This entire perspective of interpretive analysis must be
thoroughly reshaped into another type of analysis of the unconscious the
aim of which would be to foreground a-signifying semiotic components.
But before evoking one such possibility, it is necessary to try to show
that an analysis of institutions or an institutional analysis which did not
define itself as a micro-politics of desire would be incapable of moving
beyond the classical Freudian analysis.
Dual analysis and institutional analysis, whatever their theoretical ar-
guments, essentially differ as a result of the different range of semiotic
means that one and the other bring into play. The semiotic components
of institutional psychotherapy are much more numerous; they make it
difficult to respect the sacrosanct principle of "analytic neutrality" That
can "put things right" but it can also make them a lot worse. The
institution sometimes succeeds in bringing into playa-signifying ma-
chines working toward the liberation of desire, as do certain literary,
artistic, scientific machines, etc. Consequently, the question of the ana-
lyst'S or the analytic group's micro-political choices is more ambiguous
and sometimes much more "open" in institutional analysis than in "con-
sulting room" analyses. By force of circumstance, classical psychoana-
lysis almost never gets t<? the point of - assuming it ever intended to! -
abandoning its role as normalizer of the libido and behavior. The status
of subjectivation and of transference is completely different in an institu-
tion.
A-signifying diagrammatic effects, just as well as the effects of signifi-
ance and interpretance, can assume much greater proportions than in a
dual analysis, and eat away at the smallest nooks and crannies of everyday
life. The mania of interpretation, the continuous surveillance of alleged
"slips n of the unconscious, may go so far that one could call it a "para-
digmatic institutional perversion". It can happen that the blackmail of
The Place of the Signifier in the Institution 153
analysis, and the-anguish which accompanies it, reinforces the mecha-
nisms of identification with and even mimicry of the gurus of analysis.
This is the way in which a new type of psychoanalytic despotism has
established itself, these last years, in most of the institutions for children
that are "interested in analysis"
Schizoanalysis intends to radically dissociate itself from these so-called
"institutional analyses" In schizoanalysis what counts is precisely not a
centering on the signifier and on the analytic leaders. It intends to favor
a semiotic polycentrism by funhering the formation ofrelatively autono-
mous and untranslatable semiotic substances, by accommodating the
sense and non-sense of desire as they are, by not attempting to adapt the
modes of subjectivation to 1>ignification and to dominant social laws. Its
objective is not at all to recuperate facts and acts that are outside the
norm; on the contrary, it is to make a place for the singularity traits of
subjects who, for one reason or another, escape the common law. How
will these collective assemblages be able to counter the effects of this sort
of analytic scabies, which has become particularly virulent since private
radio stations have deemed it one of their prerogatives to assure its
proliferation? At the very least, by laughter, by humor, by a mockery
which deflates blow by blow the pseudo-scientific pretensions of psycho-
analysts of all stripes. This will lead to "semiotically formed", but also
socially organized, packets of resistance not only to the ravages of psy-
choanalysis but also to the diverse techniques of intimidation that work
toward the alignment of the population on family-centered models and
on the hierarchies of the system. Let it be understood that if we condemn
psychoanalysis, it is in the name of another practice of analysis, of a
micropolitical analysis which never cuts itself off - in any case, never
deliberately cuts itself off - from the real and the social field. In short, we
condemn psychoanalysis in the name of a genuine practice of analysis. The
principle reproach that we have to address to psychoanalysts is, in effect,
that they do not engage in analysis. They take refuge in their offices and
hide behind transference so that the treatment unfolds in isolation, so
that nothing from the outside creeps in. They have turned analysis into
an exercise of the pure contemplation of sliding signifiers, accompanied
by a few interpretations which are, most often, only games of seduction
without consequence.
Let's return for a moment to a problem that has already been touched
upon: that of psychopharmacology. Besides its use as a means of immo-
bilization, until now it has been in the service of a despotic signifying
semiology, of an interpretation tying problems back to closed categories.
This led the anti-psychiatrists to condemn it along with psychopatholog-
ical semiology as a whole. Psychopharmacological interventions are, in
fact, coded as much by repressive and police categories as by medical
154 Polysemiosis
ones. Making noise and disturbing the peace become something abnor-
mal: a drug is the answer. But does this repressive use of drugs constitute
a sufficient reason to condemn every use of drugs? In certain experiments
in institutional psychotherapy, attempts have been made to reorient
psychopharmacology toward collective experimentation. The adminis-
tration of drugs no longer depends exclusively on the doctor-patient
relation, but is determined by groups bringing together care-givers and
cared-for. The reference ceases to be the laboratory, becoming - at least
this would be the ideal - a collective taking up of corporeal intensities
and SUbjective effects.
The separation between drugs subject to police repression and those
utilized to quiet "agitation in the hospital" is not written in their mole-
cules. The distinction between certain drugs in the modem pharmaco-
poeia and certain illegal drugs is at times only based on side-effects,
which perhaps will be eliminated in the future. It suffices to evoke the
role played by mescaline in the work of Henri' Michaux in order to
understand that drugs can participate in a system of intensity semiotically
formed in an a-signifying mode. But today psychopharmacology is above
all utilized by psychiatry for repressive ends. Classical nosographies have
deteriorated, and with the passage of time psychiatrists have resorted to
lumping everyone together. In the United States, for example, most
problems are fit into the hoidall category of schizophrenia. And as soon
as one is labelled schizophrenic, one graduates to very high dosages of
neuroleptics. Nevertheless, psychopharmacology could just as well orient
itself toward the constitution of an a-signifying semiotic freed from
medical overcoding, the State, power, multinationals, etc. Instead of
suppressing all the richness of expression and every opening onto the real
and the socius, it would help individuals to regain their potential.
An objection that, personally, I find rather paradoxical has been raised
against analytic collective assemblages. They are seen as running the risk
of suppressing the singularities of desire, as threatening to develop into a
new type of despotism. Without a doubt what I have proposed in this
regard has been understood only in terms of what is known about the
analysis of groups, or the analysis of institutions. I repeat, for me it is not
at all a matter of substituting for the individual analysis the techniques of
the group - which can in fact end up bringing individual singularities to
heel. When I speak of assemblages, I am not necessarily speaking of
groups. Assemblages may involve individuals, but also functions, ma-
chines, diverse semiotic systems. It is only by taking desiring machines all
the way back to the molecular order - that is, to a point prior to the group
and the individual (on the side of what Lacan called l'objet a) - that we
will succeed in disarticulating mass-produced institutional structures,
and in giving marginal positions of desire the possibility of freeing them-
The Place of the Signifier in the Institution 155
selves from neurotic impasses. The slope of the individuation of desire
always leads in the direction of paranoia and particularism. The problem
is thus one of finding collective means to escape from the tyranny of
systems based on identification and individuation. It's true that the
effects of groups easily lead to systems of closure, to fixations on certain
,kinds of particulars, to xenophobic and phallocratic attitudes, etc. But
these reterritorializations, if they are taken back by creative assemblages,
can open onto other perspectives. In fact, we should carefully distinguish
between the neurotic encircling of subjectivity engaged in a process of
personological individuation, and the idiosyncracies of groups which con-
ceal possibilities of recomposirlon and transfonnation.
Consider a final example,that of a psychotic child who bangs his head
against a wall day after day. A machine of self-destructive jouissance
operates here for itself, outside of every influence. How can the desiring
energy to "bang-one's-head-against-the-wall" connect with a collective
assemblage? It's not a question of transposing this activity, of sublimating
it, but rather of making it operate on a semiotic register connectable to a
certain number of other a-signifying systems. It's not a question of
curbing desire, of switching its objects, but of expanding the field of
jouissance, of opening it to new possibilities. It will be difficult, however,
to outmaneuver adaptive and repressive attitudes, unless it is emphasized
that jouissance centered on the self always leads to the temptation of its
extreme expression: powerlessness and abolition.
For a subject, the exit from destructive narcissism does not require its
repression in the real or its castration in phantasy: it requires, on the
contrary, a supplementary strength and a neutralization of the powers
which alienate it. Thus it is essentially a matter of taking power over the
real, and never one of pure manipulation of the imaginary or symbolic.
Fernand Deligny neither represses nor interprets; he helps the mentally
challenged persons with whom he lives to succeed in experiencing other
objects, other persons, managing to construct another world.
Readaptive analysis develops a politics of signifiance; it tends to reduce
the horizon of desire to the control of the other; to the appropriation of
bodies and organs; it seeks to regain a pure becoming-conscious of the
awareness of self. Schizoanalysis renounces the "will to identity" and
personologically coordinated signifiers, in particular those of familialism.
It turns away from strategies of power, in favor of a body without organs
which disindividuates desire and accepts seeing identity swept up in
a-semiotic cosmic fluxes and a-signifying socio-historic fluxes.
In the traditional analytic approach, each time one goes from a pre-sig-
nifying semiotic to a signifying semiotic, a loss of jouissance occurs, and a
field of culpabilization and a figure of the superego impose themselves.
Playing with one's shit is participating in a kind of "matter" (you've said
156 Po/ysemiosis
it!). When an analytic intervention attempts to transform this pleasure, to
transform this matter into a translatable semiotic substance, subject to
interpretation according to the dominant code, it ends up mutilating or
abolishing it by fixing it on a "signifying semiotic semblance" which will
substitute itself for the body without organs. Normative institutions have
always devoted themselves to programming individuals, conditioning
them to an indefinite translatability of their desires. Far from changing
this state of affairs, psychoanalysis has only brought about technological
improvements in this same type of project.
It remains to be determined what grants consistency to the psychoana-
lytic politics of the emasculation of desire. Why does psychoanalysis
emerge at this point as a sort of alternative religion? To whom do its
problems belong, in the last instance? They essentially belong to forma-
tions of power which have an interest in every praxis becoming trans-
missible, indefmitely transposable in terms of the economy of decoded
fluxes. They essentially belong to capitalism (and perhaps, tomorrow, to
bureaucratic socialism) inasmuch as it is based on laws which establish
the equivalence and general translatability of all semiotic expressions.
Certainly, access to jouissance is still possible in such a system, but on the
condition that the libido submit to the dominant norms. New and quite
specific types of perverts develop under these conditions. For example,
bureaucratic perverts, whose mode of jouissance has been wonderfully
explored by Kafka. The insistence of the bureaucratic letter develops like
a canker in the tissue of industrial societies, to the benefit of "elites" who
have access to its jouissance. But since spaces are expensive and rare, and
require much preparation and training, there are countless castaway from
desire. For them, the jouissance of the capitalist letter amounts to little
more than playing the horses and the joys of watching Sunday football on
tv. But add to this the fact that losers at the races and football matches
are also countless, and much of the population ends up in psychiatric
hospitals, rehabilitation programs, prisons, etc.
In short, major choices in the economy of desire can be reduced to two
types:
either a guilty jouissance, constituted in such a way that everything
always refers to everything else - desire having no outlet other than
to invest in its own flight, and in a system of indefinite translat-
ability which constitutes the most deterritorialized modality. Rather
than opening themselves to desire, the world and history shrivel up,
closing onto a black hole-efi'ect which absorbs everything.
or a collective economy of desire which tends to scatter the mias-
mas and signifying simulacra on the basis of which this principle of
The Place of the Signifier in the Institution 157
universal debt is instituted. It reabsorbs the points ofindividuation
of the libidinal economy, the points of guilty responsibilization, the
exclusive transferences which fold desire back onto persons, roles,
hierarchy, and everything that is organized around points of
power. Its objective is to prevent a-signifying semiotic components
from falling under the sway of the signifying semiology.
Notes
This selection, "La Place du signifiant dans I'institution", is taken from Guanari's La
Revolution moliculaire, Fontenay'-sous-Bois: Recherches, 1977, pp. 277-90. I would like to
thank Brian Massumi for his advice on the finer points of this translation.
The French k sens or m4libe-sens is usually rendered as purpon, a technical term in
Hjelmslev's vocabulary meaning unformed maner.
2 L. Hjelmslev, ProkgomtmQ to a Theory of Language, trans. F. J. Whitfield. Madison: The
University of Wisconsin Press, 1963. p. 57.
3 To know whether there exist strata in a-semiotic encodings which correspond to those
of expression and content is a question that we cannot address here. Let's say simply
that there cenainly exist complex systems of aniculation, if only in genetic encoding.
Translated by Gary Genosko
14
Ritornellos and Existential Affects
"If one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers, it is true, are
imaginary - but the fear is real", notes Freud in The Interpretation of
Dreams. I The content of an oneiric message can be transformed, adorned
with makeup, or mutilated, but not its affective dimension, its thymic
component. Affect sticks to subjectivity, it is a glischroid matter, to pick
up a qualifier used by Minkowski to describe epilepsy.2 Only, an affect
sticks just as well to the subjectivity ofthe one who is its utterer as it does
to the one who is its addressee; and, in so doing, it disqualifies the
enunciative dichotomy between speaker and listener. Spinoza perfectly
pin-points this transitivist character of affect ("from the fact of conceiv-
ing a thing like ourselves to be affected with any emotion, we are
ourselves to be affected with a like emotion") and from which results
what he calls "an emulation of desire" and the deployment of multi-polar
affective compositions. Thus, the sadness we feel through the sadness of
another becomes commiseration, while "he who conceives another as
effected with hatred, will thereupon be affected himself with hatred; he
who hates a man will endeavour to remove or de!!troy him".' Affect is
thus essentially a pre-personal category, installed "before" the circum-
scription of identities, and manifested by unlocatable transferences, un-
locatable with regard to their origin as well as with regard to their
destination. Somewhere, there is hatred, in the same way that, in animist
societies, beneficent or nocuous influences circulate through the spirit of
ancestors, and, concurrentiy, oftotemic animals, or through the "mana"
of a consecrated place, the power of a ritual tattooing, a ceremonial
dance, the recounting of a myth, etc. There is thus a polyvocity of the
components of semiotization, which nonetheless are still awaiting their
existential completion [parachevement existentiel]. As the color of the
human soul as well as the color of animal becomings and of cosmic
magics, affect remains hazy, atmospheric,4 and nevertheless perfectly
apprehensible to the extent that it is characterized by the existence of
threshold effects and reversals in polarity. The difficulty here lies in that
the delimitation of an affect is not discursive, that is to say, not founded
upon systems of distinctive oppositions inflected according to sequences
of linear intelligibility and capitalized in memory banks that are mutually
Ritornellos and Existential Affects 159
compatible. Assimilable in this regard to the Bergsonian concept of
duration, an affect does not arise from existential categories, which are
able to be numbered, but from intensive and intentional categories,
which correspond to an existential self-positioning. As soon as one
decides to quantify an affect, one loses its qualitative dimensions and its
power of singularization, of heterogenesis, in other words, its eventful
compositions, the "Haecceities" that it promulgates. This is what happened
to Freud when he wanted to tum affect into the qualitative expression of
a quantity of cathecting energy (the libido) and its variations. Affect is a
process of existential appropriation through the continual creation of
heterogeneous durations of being and, given this, we would certainly be
better advised to cease treating it under the aegis of scientific paradigms
and to deliberately turn ourselves toward ethical and aesthetic para-
digms.
This is, it seems to me, what Mikhail Bakhtin invites us to do when, in
order to specify aesthetic enunciation in its relation to the ethical evalu-
ation of objective knowledge, he emphasizes that enunciation's charac-
teristic of "externally encompassing the content" of its "value bearing",
and the fact that it leads to reckoning with oneself as a "creator of form" .
5
In thus drawing affect towards the aesthetic object (which is what I wish
to underscore), Bakhtin in no way turns affect into the passive correlative
of enunciation, but into its engine, a bit paradoxically it is true, since
affect is non-discursive and entails no expense of energy - which is what
has led us elsewhere to characterize it as a deterritorialized machine.
Finitude, completion, the existential singularizing of the person in his
or her relation to himlherself, just as much as the circumscription of his
or her domain of alterity, are not self-evident, are given neither by right
nor by fact, but result from complex processes in the production of
subjectivity. And, in very particular historical conditions, artistic creation
has represented an extraordinary excrescence and exacerbation of this
production. Thus, instead of reducing subjectivity, as the structuralists
wish, to the result of signifying operations (structuralists are still, in this
regard, under the spell of Lacan 's famous formula whereby a signifier is
supposed to represent the subject for another signifier), we would prefer
to chart the various components of subjectivization in their fundamental
heterogeneity. Even in the case of the composition of a literary form
which seems nonetheless wholly tributary to language, Bakhtin under-
scores how reductive it would be,)n accounting for that composition, to
cling to nothing but the raw material of the signifier. By opposing the
creative personality, organized from within (to which he assimilates the
contemplator of the work of art), to the passive personality of the charac-
ter, organized from without as the object of a literary vision, Bakhtin is
led to distinguish five "facets" of linguistic material in order to disengage
160 Polysemiosis
an ultimate level of verbal affect that assumes the sentiment of engende-
ring all at once sound, sense, syntagmatic liaisons, and phatic valoriza-
tion on the emotional and volitional order (74). The verbal activity of
engendering a signifying sound is thus correlated with an appropriation
of rhythm, intonation, the motor elements of mimicry, articulatory ten-
sion, the internal gesticulations of narration (which are creative of move-
ment), the figurative activity of metaphor, and the entire internal impetus
of the person "actively occupying, by means of the word and of the
utterance, a certain axiological and semantic position" (74). But Bakhtin
insists that this sentiment cannot be reduced to that of a brute organic
movement engendering the psychical reality of the word, but that it is
also the semiotic movement that engenders meaning and appreciation -
"in other words, the feeling of a movement, of a taking of position which
would concern the whole man, a movement in which are drawn
together all at once the organism and its semantic activity, for what is
engendered is at once the flesh and the soul of the word, in their concrete
unity"(74).
This active potency of affect is no less complex for being non-dis-
cursive, and I would even qualify it as hyper-complex, wishing to mark
that it is an instance of the engendering of the complex, a processuality
in the throes of birth, a place for mutational becomings. Along with
affect is thus raised the question of a dis-position of enunciation on the
basis of the modular components of proto-enunciation. An affect speaks
to me, or at the very least it speaks through me. The somber red color of
my curtain enters into an existential constellation with nightfall,
with twilight, in order to engender an uncanny effect that devalues the
self-evidences and urgencies which were impressing themselves on
me only a few moments ago by letting the world sink into an apparent-
ly irremediable void. On the other hand, other scenes, other existential
territories could become canvases for highly differentiated affects. For
example, the leitmotifs of the Rheingold will induce in me count-
less sentimental, mythical, historical, and social references, or, the evo-
cation of some humanitarian problematic will trigger a complex feeling of
repulsion, revolt, and compassion. As soon as such scenic or territorializ-
ing dispositions - all the while persisting to exist on their own account
and in their own quadrants - begin to protrude beyond my immediate
environment and to engage memory and cognitive procedures, I find
myself tributory to a multi-headed enunciative lay-out [agencemenr]: the
individualized subjectivizing which, in me, is authorized to speak in
the first person is no more in fact than the fluctuating intersection,
and the consciousness "terminal", of these diverse components of
temporalization. Along with the curtain and the late hour, an affect
which one calls sensory is given as being immediately there, where-
RirornelJos and Existential Affects 161
as with problematic objects, an affect's spatio-temporal congruence
dissolves and its elucidating procedures threaten to fly off in all direc-
tions.
My idea, however, is that problematic affects are at the basis of sensory
affects and not vice versa. In such a case, the complex ceases to be
propped upon the elementary (as in the conception that prevails in
scientific paradigms) and' organizes, at the whim of its own economy,
synchronic distributions and diachronic becomings.
Let us go back over these two aspects, one after the other. As the
precarious result of a composition of modules of heterogeneous semioti-
zation, its identity permanently comprised by the proliferating phylums
ofproblematization which work it over, an affect, in its "rich" version, is
forever seeking to repossess itself. Moreover, it is essentially from this
ontological flight "in retreat", consecutive upon an infinite movement of
virtual fractalization,
6
that its existential power of self-affirmation results.
On the phenomenological plane, this question of a crossing of a threshold
by an affect, with a view toward attaining a sufficient consistency, is
raised for us by the majority of psychopathological syndromes. Below
such a threshold, it is the sphere of "pathic time" - to use the fortunate
term of Von Gebsattef - which is threatened. One will also recall here
Binswanger's repercussive chiasmus relative to autism, which would be
characterized less by an empty time - in the genre of ennui - than by an
emptiness of time.
8
Psychopathological syndromes reveal, no doubt bet-
ter than any other lay-out, what I would call the inchoate dimensions
inherent in affect, some of which literally begin to work on their own
account. AIl of which in no way means that one ought to characterize
normality as a harmonious equilibrium between the modular compo-
nents oftemporalization. Normality can be just as "disordered [deregiee]
as the other tableaux! (Certain phenomenologists have even taken note
of a syndrome of hyper-normality in melancholia.
9
) Discordance in the
ways of keeping time - what I call its ritornellizations - is not specific to
an abnormal subjectivization. What would characterize the latter, rather,
is that one mode of temporalizing, either temporarily or definitively,
takes precedence over the others, whereas a normal psyche would always
be more or less on the point of crossing from one to the other. As Robert
Musil so superbly put it: "the sane person is full of countless insanities,
and the insane person is possessed by only one" 10 The exploration ofthe
expressive levels of pathic temporalizations has not yet been seriously
undertaken. It seems to me, however, that the fallout one could bank on
from this exploration would extend well beyond the narrow field of
psychopathology and would be particularly significant in the domain of
linguistics. I imagine that the analysis of the modal and aspectual conse-
quences of the obsessive, or of the melancholic, retention of time would
162 Po/ysemiosis
lead to the formulation of a more general function of the inhibition of
enunciation; and symmetrically, that the analysis of the crazy maniacal
acceleration [Ideen./lush] would lead to a function of liquefaction. ("The
maniac is continually seized by an infinite fanning out of referrals, which
are always current, fleeting, and interchangeable." His or her temporali-
zation is "reduced to an absolute momentaneization" which ignores
all duration and disappears like the melancholic temporalization. ll)
Also imagine what the semioticians could take from a study, undoubted-
ly much more arduous, of the gap between the mute expression of
the catatonic and the fantastic "internal gesticulation" - to pick up once
again Bakhtin's expression - whose mask it is. In a more general way,
it would have to be admitted that the disordering of the myths of enun-
ciation and the resulting semiotic discordances cannot be grasped in
a homogeneous register of the production of meaning. They always
refer to the seizures of power by extra-linguistic components: so-
matic, ethological, mythographical, institutional, economic, aesthetic,
etc. This business is less visible during the "normal" use of speech, on
account of the fact that existential affects are more disciplined there,
subjugated as they are to a law of generalized homogenization and
equivalence.
Under the generic term of ritomello, I would place reiterative discur-
sive sequences that are closed in upon themselves and whose function is
an extrinsic catalyzing of existential affects. Ritomellos can find sub-
stance in rhythmic and plastic forms, in prosodic segments, in facial
traits, in the emblems of recognition, in leitmotifs, signatures, proper
names or their invocational equivalents; they can just as well be found
transversally between different substances - this is the case with Proust's
"ritomellos of times past", which are constantly entering into corres-
pondence with each other. 12 They can just as well be of a sensory order
(the madeleine dipped in the cup of tea, the uneven paving stones in the
courtyard of the Guermantes's Hotel, the "bit of phrase" ofVinteuil, the
plastic compositions around the belltower of Martinville) as of a proble-
matic order (the ambiance in the salon of the Verdurins), as of a facial
order (Odette's face). In order to situate the intersectional position of
ritomellos between the sensory and the problematic dimensions of enun-
ciation, I propose to "frame" the significational relation: f (sign) (that is,
the relation of reciprocal presupposition, or of solidarity, according to
Hjelmslev's terminology, between the form of an Expression and the
form of its Content), of four semiotic functions relating to the Referent
and to Enunciation. Thus, we would have:
1 a denotative function: f (den), corresponding to the relations be-
tween the form of the Content and the Referent;
Ritornellos and Existtntial Affects 163
2 a diagrammati"c function: f (diag), corresponding to the relations
between the matter of the Expression and the Referent;
3 a function of sensory affect (ritomello), corresponding to the rela-
tions between Enunciation and the form of the Expression;
4 a function of proBlematic affect (abstract machine), corresponding
to the relations-between Enunciation and the form of the Content.
Note that, inasmuch as it is possible to conceive of keeping the signifi-
cational, denotative, and diagrammatic functions within the traditional
framework of the semantic and syntactic domains, there is no question
here of enclosing the two existential affect functions within a third
compartment that would be labeled: pragmatics. As Hjelmslev has force-
fully underscored, linguistics cannot (anymore than the other semiotic
systems) arise from an autonomous axiomatization.
13
And it is along this
slope formed by the concatenations of partial enunciative territories that
there occurs a generalized flight of the systems of expression towards the
social, the "pre-personal", the ethical, and the aesthetical.
What can one expect from our ritornello-abstract machine dyad? Es-
sentially a pinpointing and a deciphering of the practical existential
operators installed at the intersection of Expression and Content. An
intersection where, I insist, nothing is ever played out within a perfect
structuralist synchrony, where everything is always an affair of contingent
lay-outs, of heterogenesis, of irreversibility, of singularization. With
Hjelmslev, we learned that the fundamental reversibility between the
Enuniciation problematic affect
f(exi)" .
sensory
affect
(ritornello)
(abstract machine)
form Content
~ (SUbstance)}
matter
f(den)
{
form
Expres$ion (substance) oOIII .. i ~ ~ Referent
<"'"'"- matter
f(diag)
164 Polysemiosis
form of the Expression and the form of the Content arches over the
heterogeneity of the substances and matters which are its support. But,
with Bakhtin, we learned to read the foliatedness of enunciation, its
polyphony and its multi-centeredness. How can it be understood, for
example, that the heterogeneous voices of delirium and of creation are
able to cooperate in the lay-out of sense productions beyond common
sense which, far from establishing themselves in a deficit position from
the cognitive point of view, sometimes allow access to highly enriching
existential truths? For too long, linguists have refused to face up to
enunciation, having only wanted to take it into account as a breaking and
entering into the structural woof of semantic-syntactic processes. In fact,
enunciation is in no way a faraway suburb of language. It constitutes the
active kernel of linguistic and semiotic creativity. And, were they truly
disposed to greet its singularizing function, it seems to me that linguists
would be advised, if not to substitute proper names for the categorical
symbols that dominate the syntagmatic and semantic trees they have
inherited from the Chomskyians and the post-Chomskyians, then at least
to graft them onto the rhizomes of ritornellos clinging to those proper
names. We must re-learn ritomello games which fix the existential orde-
ring of sensory environment and which prop up the meta-modelizing
scenes of the most abstract problematic affects. Let's survey a few exam-
ples. Marcel Duchamp's Boule Rack functions as the trigger for a constel-
lation of referential universes engaging both intimate reminiscences (the
cellar of the house, a certain winter, the rays of light upon spider webs,
adolescent solitude) and connotations of a cultural or economic order -
the time when bottles were still washed with the aid of a bottle
brush The Benjaminian aura
14
or Barthes's punctum
15
arise equally
from this genre of singularizing ritornellization. It is the latter too which
confers the sense ofscale onto architectural lay-outs. 16 Onto what details,
perhaps miniscule, does the perception of a child alight while traversing
the bleak pathways of an HLM ensemble?17 How, on the basis of some
distressing seriality, does he/she succeed in gracing hisJher discovering
with the world of magic halos? Without this aura, without this ritornelliz-
ing of the sensory world - which is established, moreover, in the deterri-
torialized prolongation of ethological
18
and archaic
19
ritomellos - the
surrounding objects would lose their "air" of familiarity and would
collapse into an anguishing and uncanny strangeness.
Ritomellos of Expression take the lead in sensory affects: the intona-
tion, for example, of an actor will fix the melodramatic tum of an action,
or the "deep voice" of the father will trigger the thunderbolts of the Super
Ego. (Some American researchers have even succeeded in demonstrating
that the most constrained smile will entail, in the manner of a Pavlovian
reflex, some anti-depressing bio-somatic effects!) On the other hand, the
RitornelJos and Existential Affects 165
prevalence of Content iitomellos, or abstract machines, is affirmed by
problematic affects, which operate just as well in the sense of an individ-
uation as of a social serialization. (Moreover, the two procedures are not
antagonistic; the existential options, in this register, are not mutually
exclusive, but entertain relations of segmentarity, of substitution and of
agglomeration.) For example, the primary purposiveness of an Icon of
the Orthodox Church is not to represent a Saint, but to open an enunci-
ative territory for the faithful, allowing them to enter into direct com-
munication with the Saint.20 The facial ritornello then derives its
intensity from its intervening as a shifter - in the sense of a "scene
changer" - in the heart of a palimpsest superimposing the existential
territories of the proper body upon those of personological, conjugal,
domestic, ethnic, and other identities. In a wholly other register, the
signature posed upon a banking slip functions too as a ritornello of
capitalist normalization: what is behind this scratch? Not just the person
it denotes, but also the assonances of power that it triggers in the society
of "well placed" people.
The human sciences, especially psychoanalysis, have for too long ac-
customed us to think of affect in terms of an elementary entity. But there
also exist complex affects, inaugural of irreversible diachronic ruptures
that would have to be called: the Christic affect, the Debussy affect, the
Leninist affect. . So it is that for decades, a constellation of existential
ritomellos gave access to a "Lenin-language" engaging specific proce-
dures which could just as well be of a rhetorical and lexical order as of a
phonological, prosodic, facial, or other order. The threshold crossing-
or initiation - that legitimates a relation of full existential belonging to a
group-SUbject depends upon a certain concatenation and becoming con-
sistent of these components, which are thereby ritornellized. I have
previously tried to show, for example, that Trotsky never truly succeeded
in crossing the threshold of consistency for the collective apparatus that
was the Bolshevik Party.21
Enunciation is like an orchestra conductor who on occasion accepts a
loss of control over the musicians: at certain moments, it is articulatory
pleasure or rhythm, or it is an inflated style that begins to playa solo and
to impose it upon the others. Let us underscore that if an enunciative
lay-out can entail multiple social voices, it also engages pre-personal
voices susceptible of inducing an aesthetic ecstasy, a mystical effusion, or
an ethological panic - such as an agoraphobic syndrome - as well as an
ethical imperative. It can be seen that every concerting emancipation is
conceivable. A good conductor does not strive despotically to overcode
the ensemble of these components but attends to the collective crossing
of the aethetic object's completion threshold as designated by the proper
name inscribed at the head of the musical score. "There you go!"
166 Po/ysemiosis
Tempo, accent, phrasing, equilibrium of the parts, harmonies, rhythms,
and tone: everything conspires to the reinvention of the work and to its
propulsion into new orbits of deterritorialized sensibility
An affect is therefore not, as the "shrinks" commonly wish to represent
it, a passively endured state. It is a complex, subjective territoriality of
proto-enunciation, the site of a work, of a potential praxis, bearing upon
two conjoined dimensions:
1 a process of extrinsic dissymmetricalization which polarizes an
intentionality towards fields of non-discursive value (or Universes
of reference); such an "ethicalization" of subjectivity being cor-
relative of an historicizing and a singularizing of its existential
trajectory;
2 a process of intrinsic symmetricalization, evoking not only Bakh-
tin's aesthetic completion but also Benoit Mandelbrot's fractaliza-
tion
22
and which consists in conferring to affect the consistency of
a deterritorialized object and the taking of a self-existentializing
enunciative autonomy.
Let us listen again to Bakhtin: "By its own forces, the word translates
the completing form into content: thus, in poetry, imploration, aesthetic-
ally organized, begins to suffice in and of itself and has no more need to
be satisfied, being in some way satisfied by the very form of its expres-
sion; prayer has no more need of a god who would hear it; the plea has
no more need of help; the repentance no more need of pardon, etc. With
the help of matter alone, the fonn fulfills the event, and every ethical
tension, up to its full accomplishment. With the help of matter alone, the
author adopts a creative attitude, productive in relation to its content,
that is to say, in relation to cognitive and ethical values. It is as if the
author entered into the event isolated and became there a creator without
being a participant" (73-74). The function of completion as disjunction
of content - in the sense that a circuit breaker may trip or disjunct - and
this self-generation of enunciation seem altogether satisfying to me. But
the other traits by which Bakhtin characterizes the aesthetically signifying
fonn, namely unification, individuation, totalization, and isolation, seem
to me to call forth certain elaborations. Isolation: yes, but an active one,
going in the direction of what I have elsewhere called a processual
putting into a-significance. Unification, individuation, totalization: cer-
tainly! but open and "multiplicatory" It is here that I would like to
another idea, that of a fractal setting of consistency. The unity
of the object is, in reality, but a subjectivizing movement. Nothing is
given in and of itself. Consistency is only attained through a perpetual
Ritornellos and Existential Affects 167
flight in advance o(lDwardness, which conquers an existential territory in
the very time that if loses it, and wherein, however, it strives to retain a
stroboscopic memory. Reference is no longer there except as the canvas
for a reiterative ritornello. What matters is the cut, the gap, which turns
reference around on itself and which engenders not only a feeling of
being - a sensory affect - but also an active way of being - a problematic
affect.
This deterritorializing reiteration is effected equally along two axes
(synchronic and diachronic), not separated this time into the autonomy
of extrinsic coordinates, but woven together into intensive ordinates:
1 Some of these are intentional, whereby each affect territory is the
object of a fractalization - which one can illustrate by the mathe-
matical operation called "the Baker transformation" which devel-
ops relations of internal symmetry.23 By this I understand that it is
through an inchoate tension, a permanent "work in progress", that
an affect's "taking of being" is renewed and takes its consistency;
none of its partitions, be they infmitesimal, escape the existential
procedures of homothetic replication deployed outside the regis-
ters of discursive extensivity by sensory and problematic ritornel-
los. Not only do all the spatio-temporal angles of approach turn
out to be thereby explored and subsumed, but so also does the set
(or the integer) of the points of view of scale - to return again to
that fundamental category of architecturology.
2 A trans-monadic axis, one of transversality, which confers its tran-
sitivist character onto enunciation, making it constantly drift from
one existential territorialization to another, and generating, on the
basis of this territorialization, datings and singUlarizing durations.
(Once again, a primal example here would be that of the Proustian
ritornellos.)
Subjectivization straddles both actual and virtual enunciative points of
view. It wants to be everything without exception and is in fact nothing,
or almost nothing, because it is irremediably fragmentary, in a perpetual
lag [decalage] vis-a.-vis its pomp and its works Finitude and existential
completion, result from a crossing of threshold which is in no way a
fencing in, a circumscription. Self and other are agglomerated in the
heart of ethical intentionality and of the aesthetic promotion of an end.
What completely falsifies the reading of psychoanalytic authors when
they discuss the ego is that, literally, one does not know what they are
talking about because they have not given themselves the means to
understand that the ego is not a discursive ensemble entertaining gestalt
168 Polysemiosis
relations with a referent. So one cannot accept the validity of the divi-
sions they propose. Of course, it's always posible to make out of all this
a "displaced" representation, to construct a meta-modeled scene and to
decree that the ego is precisely identified with that scene. In any of the
ways one looks at the ego, one scarcely has other means to talk, to draw,
to write something about it. It does not remain any the less for that
matter that the ego is the whole wide world: I am all that LJe suis tout ,all
No more than to the cosmos do I recognize any limit to myself. If, by
chance, it were otherwise, ifl had to "fall back" onto my body, then there
is a malaise. The ego arises from a logic of all or nothing. There always
exists a part of myself that poorly tolerates anyone's declaring that
beyond this territory, it is no longer me. No! Beyond, it will always be
me, even if another kind of territory claims to impose itself on me; unless
the question of the ego ceases to be raised and that every possibility of
self-enunciation is abolished; a horrifying and unnamable perspective,
which one would prefer not to look too fully in the face, and which
generally leads us to talk about something else
It is because affect is not a massively elementary energy but the
deterritorialized matter of enunciation, an integer of highly differentiated
insight and "outsight", that we have something to do with it, that we can
work it out. Not in the manner of traditional psychoanalysis, that is,
under the force of modeling identifications and symbolic integrations,
but by deploying its ethico-aesthetic dimensions through the mediation
of ritomellos. (On this point, I rejoin Emmanuel Uvinas, when he draws
an intrinsic association between faceness and ethics.
24
) Consider, for
example, the symptomatic ritomellos inhabiting Pierre Janet's psycho-
logical automatisms, Karl Jasper's primary delirious experiences, or
Freud's fantasmatic unconscious. There are two possible attitudes: those
which make of these an immovable state of fact and those, on the
contrary, which begin from the idea that nothing is played olit in ad-
vance, that analytico-aesthetic and ethico-social practices are susceptible
of opening up new fields of possibility. In its origins, Freudianism truly
was a mutation in the lay-out of enunciation. Its interpretive techniques,
its interventions within oneiric and psychopathological ritomellos bore in
appearance only upon semantic contents - the illusory revelation of a
"latent content" In fact, the whole of Freud's an consisted in making
ritomellos play in unprecedented scenes of affect: free association, sug-
gestion, tranference - all so many new ways to speak and to see
things! But what psychoanalysis has missed, in the course of its historical
development, is the heterogenesis of the semiotic components of its
enunciation. At its origin, the Freudian unconscious still took into ac-
count two matters of expression, linguistic and iconic; but with its
structuralizing, psychoanalysis claimed to reduce everything to the term
Ritornellos and Existential Affects 169
of the signific:r, indeed, to that of the "matheme". Everything leads me to
think, on the other hand, that it would be preferable for psychoanalysis
to multiply and differentiate, to the extent possible, the expressive com-
ponentsthat it puts into play. And that its own enunciative lay-outs be
no longer neces.sarily disposed adjacent to the couch and in a way that
radically forecloses the dialectics of the gaze. Analysis has everything to
gain from enlarging its means of intervention; it can work with words, but
just as well with modeling clay (as does Gisela Pankow) or with videos,
movies, the theatre, institutional structures, familial interactions, etc., in
short, everything that would allow it to sharpen the a-significant facets of
the ritornellos it meets and in such a way that it would be in a better
position to engage their catalyzing functions in the crystallization of new
universes of reference (the function of fractalization). Under these con-
ditions, analysis will no longer rest upon the interpretation of phantasms
and the displacement of affects, but it will strive to make each of them
operational, to give them a new "stave" in the musical sense of the word.
Its basic work would consist in detecting encysted singularities (what
goes around in circles, what insists on nothing, what stubbornly refuses
the dominant evidence, what puts itself in opposition to its manifest
interest. .), and in exploiting their pragmatic virtualities.
What can account for the reductionist slope of signification along
which psychoanalytic affect has not ceased to slide, with its increasingly
empty transferences, its increasingly stereotypical asepticized exchanges?
This slope is inseparable, it seems to me, from the much more general
curvature of capitalist universes towards an entropy of significational
equivalences. This would be a world in which everything is worth every-
thing else, where every existential singularity is methodically devalued,
where in particular affects of contingency relative to old age, sickness,
madness, and death are emptied of their existential syntagms and will
henceforth arise only from abstract paradigms that are managed by a
network of help and care outfitters - all of this steeped in an ineffable but
omnipresent atmosphere of anxiety and unconscious guilt.25 Is this a
Weberian disenchantment, correlative, we remember, of a devaluation,
of a "sacramental anti-magic", 26 or is it the all-directional re-enchant-
ment of the productions of subjectivity, through the depolarizing of
collective universes of reference with regard to the values of a generalized
equivalencing and to the profit of an infinite gearing down of the existen-
tial takings of valence? Although the current inflation of informational
and communicational logics scarcely seems to be moving in this direc-
tion, it seems to me that it is indeed upon the promotion of analytical,
social, and aesthetic practices which are preparing the arrival of such a
post-media era that our future depends, at whatever level one considers
it.
170 Polysemiosis
Notes
This translation was published in Discourse 1212 (1990): 68-88. It has also appeared as
"Ritournelles et affects existentiels" in Chimeres 7 (1989) and Cartographies schizoanaiyliques
(Paris: Galilee, 1989), pp. 251-68.
I Sigmund Freud, L'inltrprttatWn des rives (paris: PUF, 1967). [In the SE, the line is
marked as a quotation from a cenain S. Stricker.]
2 [On epilepsy as "glischroidy", see Eugene Minkowski, Lived Time: Phenomenological
and Psychological Studies, trans. Nancy Metzel (Evanston: Nonhwestern University
Press, 1970), pp. 102-11.)
3 Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics, cd. and tranS. R.H.M. Elwes (New York: Dover,
1951), pp. 148, 156-7, vol. 2 of Chief Work!.
4 With regard to schizophrenic alienation, phenomenological psychiatry advocates a
diagnostic based upon a precocious lived experience (Rumke) or upon a feeling
(Binswanger) or an intuition (Weitbrecht). TeUenbach envisages an "atmospheric
diagnostic" as asccnaining the dissonance between the atmospheres proper to each of
the two "panners", without seeking to amalgamate isolated symptoms. Cf. Arthur
Tatossian, Phtnomenologie des psychoses (paris: Masson, 1980).
5 Mikhail Bakhtin: "In order to become compositional and to bring about form in the
aesthetic object, every verbal syntactic liaison must be penetrated by the unity of the
unique feeling of a liaison-making activity, which aims at the unity (brought about by
it) of objective and semantic liaisons "with a cognitive or ethical character, over and
above the unity of the feeling of tensions and formative encompassing of the external
encompassing of the theoretical and ethical content". "Lc problemc du contenu, du
materiau ct de la forme dans l'oeuvre lineraire", Estherique tit thiorie du roman (Paris:
Gallimard, 1978), p. 78. Guattari's further references to this volume are embedded in
his essay.
6 Here, vinuality is correlative of a fractal deterritorialization, which is at once of infinite
speed upon the temporal plane and generative of infinitesimal deviations upon the
spatial plane. See my text, "I.e Cycle des agencements"
7 Quoted in Tatossian, p. 169.
8 Tatossian, p. 117.
9 Tatossian, p. 103.
10 Roben Musil, L 'Homme sam qualire (paris: Lc Seuil, 1956), Tome II, p. 400. The Man
Wuhour Qualicies, trans. Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, reo ed. (London: Pan, 1979),
Vol. iii, pp. 421-22.]
11 Tatossian, p. 186.
12 See the chapter on "Lcs Ritornelles du temps perdu" in my L'lnconscunt machinique
(Paris: Recherches, 1979), pp. 239-336.
13 Louis Hjelmslev, NoufHIaux essais, ed. FranIFois Rastier (paris: PUF, 1985), pp. 74-75.
14 Walter Benjamin, Essais (Paris: Denoel-Gonthier, 1983) ["The Work of An in the Age
of Mechanical Reproduction", in Illuminalium, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn
(New York: Schocken, 1969.]
15 Roland Barthes, La chambre claire (Paris: Le Seuil, 1980) [Camera Lucida: RefUctions on
Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981.]
16 Christian Girard, Architecture et concepa nomades (Brussels: Mardaga, 1986). Philippe:
Bouton, in La Ville de Richelieu (Paris: AREA, 1972), distinguishes twenty types of
scales that are considered as the space of reference for architectural conceptualizing:
technical, functional, formal symbolic, the dimensional symbolic of a model, semantic,
sociocultural, environmental, optical visibility, apponionmental, geographical, from
the point of view of extensiveness, cartographical, from the point of view of repre-
RitomeJlos and Existential Affects 171
sentation, geQ!D.etrical, the levels of conceptualization, human, global, economic.
Other classifications and regroupings can be conceived, but what matters here is
respect for the heterogeneity ofthe points of view.
17 [Habitation Ii layer motUri ... a large, usually state-run, housing project for low-income
renters.]
18 See my chapter oD,. "L'Ethologie des ritomelles sonores, visuelles et componementales
dans Ie monde animal", L'lnc()Pl$cient machinique, pp. 117-53.
19 In La Pensee chinoise (paris: Albin Michel, 1980), Marcel Granet shows the com-
plementarity between the ritomellos of social demarcation in ancient China and the
affects, or vinues as he calls them, borne along by vocables, graphisms, emblems, etc.:
"the specific vinue of a lordly race was expressed by a song and dance (with either an
animal or a vegetable motif). Without a doubt, it is appropriate to recognize for the old
family names the value of a kind of musical motto - which translates graphically into a
kind of coat of anns - the entire efficacity of the dance and the chants lying just as much
in the graphic emblem as in the vocal emblem" (pp. 50-I).
20 This is only true for those icons, whose fabrication is staggered between the ninth and
the sixteenth centuries, that are centered upon a mystic, almost sacramental, faceness.
Afterwards, the icons become weighed down with vestimentary details, their characters
multiply, and they are covered over with metallic sheathings (okJads). Cf. the article
"Ic6nes", by Jean Blankoff and Olivier Clement, Encyclopedia Uniwnalis, Tome 9
(1984), pp. 739-42.
21 See my chapter, "La Coupure leniniste", in et tranwenaliU, 2nd ed.
(Paris: Maspero, 1974), 183-95.
22 Benoit Mandelbrot, 1..11$ objeufractals (Paris: Fiammarion, 1984) Fraccals: Form, Chance
and Dimension (San Francisco: Freeman, 1977).]; "Les Fractals", Encyclopedia UnifJer-
salis, Symposium, pp. 319-23.
23 nya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, La Nouwll8 alliance (Paris: Gallimard, 1979)
[Order Out O/Chaos: Man's New Dialogue With Nature (Boulder: New Science Library,
1984).]; Ivan Ekelard, Le Calcul, l'imprifJu (Paris: Le Seuil, 1984).
24 Emmanuel Levinas: "1 think that access to the face is in and of itself ethical" (ErhUiue
lit infini. Paris: Fayarel, 1982, p. 89). Levinas: "The signification of the face is not a kinel
for which designation or symbolism would be the genre" (Heidegger ou la quntion de
Dim. Paris: Grasset, 1981, p. 243). Uvinas: "The responsibility for the other is not an
accident happening to a subject, but in that subject precedes Essence and engagement
OD behalf of others" (Humanisme de l'aUlTe homme. Paris: Fata Morgana, 1972).
25 Cf. Jean Delumeau, Le Peche et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident (Paris; Fayard,
1983).
26 Max Weber associated the idea of a disenchatment (Entzauberung) of the world to a
devaluation (Entwemmg) of the sacraments as the message of salvation and to a loss of
sacramental magic consecutive to the rise of the capitalist subjectivity (L'erhique
proustante Sf I'esp"', du ClJpitalisnu. Paris: Pion, 1967) [The Protestan, Ethic and the Spirit
o/Capitalism, trans, Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner's, 1958).)
Translated by Juliana Schiesari and Georges Van Den Abbeele
15
Microphysics of Power I
Micropolitics of Desire
(Milan, May 31, 1985)
The following abbreviations are used to cite Michel Foucault's
work. The original pagination is cited first, followed by the available
English translation.
A.S. L'Archeologie du sa 'Voir (paris: Gallimard, 1969); The Archaeo-
logy of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pan-
theon Books, 1972).
H.F. Hisroire de la folie a ['age classique (Paris: Gallimard, 1976);
Madness and Civilization, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Ran-
don House, 1973).
H.S. Hisroire de la sexualite, Vol. 1. La Volonte de sa'Voir (Paris:
Gallimard, 1976), Vol. 2. L 'Usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard,
1984); The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York:
Random House, 1978); Vol. 2. The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert
Hurley (New York: Random House, 1985).
M.C. Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); The Order of
Things (New York: Random House, 1970).
M.F. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault. Un Par-
cours philosophique, trans. Fabienne Durand-Bogaert (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1984); Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and
Hermeneutics (Chicago: University ,of Chicago Press, 1983).
O.D. L'Ordre du discours (Paris: Gallimard, 1971); "The Discourse
on Language", in The Archaeology of Knowledge.
P. "L'Oeil du pouvoir", in Jeremy Bentham, Le Panoptique (Paris:
Belfond, 1977); "The Eye of Power", in PowerlKnowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. C. Gordin (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1980).
R.R. Raymond Roussel (Paris: Gallimard, 1963); Death and the
Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel, trans. Charles Ruas (New
York: Doubclday and Co., 1986).
Microphysics of PowerlMicropolitics of Desire 173
S.P. punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975); Discipline and Pun-
ish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage
Books, 1977).
Having had the privjJege of seeing Michel Foucault take up my sugges-
tion - expressed somewhat provocatively - that concepts were after all
nothing but tools and that theories were equivalent to the boxes that
contained them (their power scarcely able to surpass the services that
they rendered in circumscribed fields, that is, at the time of historical
sequences that were inevitably delimited), you ought not as a result be
surprised in seeing me today rummaging through Foucault's conceptual
tool shop so that I might borrow some of his own instruments and, if
need be, alter them to suit my own purposes.
Moreover, I am convinced that it was precisely in this manner that
Foucault intended that we make use of his contribution.
It is not by qleans of an exegetical practice that one could hope to keep
alive the thought of a great thinker who has passed away. Rather, such a
thought can only be kept alive through its renewal, by putting it back into
action, reopening its questioning, and by preserving its distinct uncer-
tainties - with all the risks that this entails for those who make the
attempt.
I leave it to you to relate this initial banality to the somewhat tired
genre of the posthumous homage! In one of his last essays, which dealt
with the economy of power relations, Foucault entreated his reader not
to be repelled by the banality of the facts that he mentioned: "the fact
[that] they're banal does not mean they don't exist. What we have to do
with banal facts is to discover - or try to discover - which specific and
perhaps original problem is connected with them" (M.F. 299/210). In
this way, I believe that what is quite exceptional and perhaps now ready
to be discovered, in the manner which Foucault's thought is destined to
survive him, is that this thought traces out, better than any other, the
most urgent problematics of our societies. And to date, nothing has
shown itself to be as elaborate as this thought, certainly not the already
outmoded approaches of "postmodernisms" and "postpoliticalisms",
which in the face of these same problema tics have all run aground.
The most crucial aspect of Foucault's intellectual development con-
sists in having moved away from both a starting point that was leading
him towards a hermeneutic interpretation of social discourse and from a
final goal that would have entailed a closed structuralist reading of this
same discourse. It is in The Archaeology of Knowledge that he supposedly
carried out this two-fold conspiracy. Whereas in fact it is here that he
explicitly freed himself from this perspective, initially employed in Mad-
ness and Civilization, by announcing that for him it was no longer a
174 Polysemiosis
question of "interpreting discourse with a view to writing a history of the
referent" Rather, his stated intention was to henceforth "substitute for
the enigmatic treasure of things' anterior to discourse, the regular for-
mation of objects that emerge only in discourse" (A.S. 64-67/47-49).
This refusal to make reference to the "foundation of things", as well as
the renunciation of the profound depths of meaning, is parallel and
symmetrical to the De1euzian position that rejects the lofty objects [objet
des hauteurs] as well as any transcendental position of representation.
With Foucault and Deleuze, horizontalness a certain transversality
accompanied by a new principle of contiguity-discontinuity is
presented in opposition to the traditional vertical stance of thought. It
should be noted that it was around this same turbulent period that
oppressive hierarchies of power were being put into question. It was also
a period marked by the discovery of new lived dimensions of spatiality; as
seen, for example, in the somersaults of the astronauts, the innovative
experiments in the field of dance and, in particular, the flourishing of the
Japanese Buto.
Foucault's new programme was now spelled out: to renounce the
"question of origins", I to leave for analysis "a blank, indifferent space,
lacking in both interiority and promise" (A.S. 54139) without, however,
falling into the trap of a flat reading of the signifier.
It was in this respect that during his inaugural talk in 1970 at the
College de France, Foucault issued a kind of solemn warning:
" [d) iscourse thus nullifies itself, in reality, in placing itself at the disposal
of the signifier" (O.D. 51/228).
Indeed, after a period of initial hesitation, Foucault came to consider
as pernicious any structuralist endeavor to "'treat discourse as groups of
signs (signifying elements referring to contents or representations)"
Instead, he wished to apprehend these discourses from the perspective of
"practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak" "'Of
course", Foucault continues, "discourses are composed of signs; but
what they do is more than use these signs to designate things. It is this
more that renders them irreducible to language [langue] and to speech"
(A.S. 66-67/49) [t.m.]. In this way, Foucault left the ghetto of the
signifier and the asserted will in order to take into account the productive
dimension of the enunciation. But of what is this 'more" (that is here in
question) constituted? Is it a matter of a simple subjective illusion? Does
this "more" go in search of an "already there", or a process that is being
deployed? There is probably no universal answer to these questions.
Each regional or global cartography, depending on whether it is inclined
towards aesthetic or scientific ideological claims, defines its own field of
pragmatic efficiency. And it is quite evident that a renunciation - of the
sort proposed by Foucault - of the reductive myths that are generally in
Microphys-ics of PowerlMicropolitics of Desire 175
fashion in the human sciences would not be without its effect on the
political and micropolitical stakes of, for example, the care giver--cared
for relationship, the role of specialists in psychology, the positions occu-
pied by these specialists within the university, the preoccupations of the
mass media, the hierllfchies existing between the different levels of the
state, and so forth. Having successfully devalued the imaginary compo-
nent of the real, to the exclusive benefit of its symbolic component, the
French structuralists of the sixties in effect established a kind of religious
trinity comprised of the Symbolic, Real, and Imaginary - its missionaries
and converts disseminating and preaching the new good tidings just
about everywhere, attempting brutally, or sometimes quite subtly, to
invalidate any view that did not mesh with their own hegemonic will. But
we know quite well that no Trinity - whether it be of the overwhelming
sort that is the Hegelian accomplishment, or that of a Charles Sanders
Pierce, whose richness still remains largely unexplored - has been, nor
will ever be, b l ~ to take into account, for example, the singular being of
an ordinary sliver in desiring flesh. And upon a moment's reflection, we
can very well understand why this is so: these trinities are constituted
precisely as a way to conjure away the random ruptures or rare occurren-
ces which Foucault has shown us to be the essential thread of any
existential affirmation. "Rarity and affirmation; rarity in the last resort of
affirmation - certainly not any continuous outpouring of meaning, and
certainly not any monarchy of the signifier" CO.D. 72/234).2 In a word,
the reality of history and desire, the productions of the soul, body, and
sex, do not pass through this kind of tripartition, which is ultimately
quite simplistic.' These involve a completely other categorical reduction
[demultiplication categorielle] of the semiotic components opening onto
imaginary scenes or in the form of symbolic diagrams. Both the rupturing
of the portmanteau-concept of the signifier, as well as the critique of the
Lacanian adage that only the signifier can represent the subject for an-
other signifier, go hand in hand with the radical questioning of the
philosophical tradition of the "founding subject". Foucault challenges the
conception of the subject that supposedly "animates the empty forms of
language with its objectives" (O.D. 49/227) [t.m]. Instead, Foucault
commits himself to describing the actual agents that engender the discur-
sivity of social groups and institutions - which in tum leads him to the
discovery of a vast domain of forms of collective production and technical
modalities of the construction of subjectivity, virtually unrecognized until
then. This is not to be understood in the sense of a causal determination,
but rather, as the rarefaction and/or proliferation of the semiotic compo-
nents at the intersection from which they arise. Behind the obvious
"logophilia" of the dominant culture, he analyses a profound "logopho-
bia", a ferocious will to master and control "the great proliferation of
176 Polysemwsis
discourses, in such a way as to relieve the richness of its most dangerous
elements; as well as to organize its disorder so as to elude its most
uncontrollable aspects" and a mute fear against the sudden appearance
'of statements, of events, and against "everything that could possibly be
violent, discontinuous, querulous, disordered even and perilous in it, of
the incessant, disorderly buzzing of discourse" (O.D. 52-53/228-29)
[t.m].
We can distinguish two ways in which Foucault considers how the
subjectivity which he explores eludes the reductionistic approaches that
have taken root virtually everywhere:
1 that of a reterritorialization leading to an updating of subjectivity's
institutional components of semiotization, and what charges it
with history and factual contingency - it is at this level that it
distinguishes itself from all variations of structuralism;
2 that of a de territorialization that shows subjectivity to be, accord-
ing to an expression put forth in Discipline and Punish, a creator of
a "real, non-corporeal soul" It is also implied in this humorous
warning: "It would be wrong to say that the soul is an illusion, or
an ideological effect. On the contrary, it exists, it has a reality, it is
produced permanently around, on, within the body." (S.P.
34/29). We are here in the register of an "incorporeal materialism"
(O.D. 60/231) that is as far removed from ihe rigid forms of
hermeneutical interpretations as it is from the lures of a certain
currently fashionable "non-materialism"
It is a matter, henceforth, of escaping from, by way of an analytic
practice - what Foucault calls a "discourse as practice" - the agents of
subjugation whatever may be their level of institution. In an interview -
that seems to constitute a kind of testament - with Hubert Dreyfus and
Paul Rabinow, Foucault continues to aver that "we need to promote new
forms of subjectivities by renouncing the type of individuality that was
imposed upon us over several centuries" (M.F. 301-302) [my trans.].
Furthermore, he takes care to list the conditions that permit an advance-
ment towards a new economy of power relations. The struggles for the
transformation of subjectivity, Foucault explains, are not ordinary forms
of opposition to authority. Rather, they are characterized by the following
aspects:
1 they are "transversal" (for Foucault this means that these struggles
arc to be understood as emerging from the particular context of the
country in question);
Microphysics of PowerlMicropolitics of Desire 177
2 they are opposed to all categories of power effects, and not just
those that pertain to "visible" social struggles; for example, those
effects that'are exercised over people's bodies and their health;
3 they are imrn(!,diate, in the sense that these struggles are aimed at
the forms of power that are closest to those engaged in the struggle,
and because lbey do not yield to any predetermined resolution,
such as we fmd in the programmes of political parties;
4 they put into question the status of the normalized individual and
assert a fundamental right to difference (which is, moreover, not in
the least incompatible with community choices);
5 they are opposed to the privileges of knowledge and their mysti-
fying function;
6 they involve a refusal of the economic and ideological violence of
the t a t e ~ and of all its forms of scientific and administrative
inquisition.
Across these various prescriptions, we see that the decoding of "the
political technologies of the body", the "microphysics of power" (S.P.
31/26) and of the "discursive 'policy'" (O.D. 37/224), proposed by
Foucault does not consist of a simple contemplative point of reference,
but rather involves what I have called micropolitics, that is, a molecular
analysis that allows us to move from forms of power to investments of
desire.
When Foucault speaks of desire, which he does repeatedly in his work,
he always means it in a sense that is far more restricted than the way
Deleuze and I employ this term. We can, nevertheless, note that his quite
distinct notion of power has, if I may say so, the effect of "pulling" this
concept in the direction of desire. It is in this way that he deals with
power as a matter that has to do with an investment and not with an "all
or nothing" law. Throughout his entire life, Foucault refused to conceive
of power as a reified entity. For him, relations of power and, by conse-
quence, strategic struggles, never amount to being mere objective rela-
tions of force. Rather, these relations involve the processes of
subjectification in their most essential and irreducible singularity. And
within them, we will always find "the Obstinacy of the will and the
intransitivity of freedom" (M.F. 312-315) [my trans.].
As such, power is not exercised "simply as an obligation or a prohibi-
tion on those who 'do not have it'; it invests them, is transmitted by them
and through them; it exerts pressure upon them, just as they themselves,
in their struggle against it, resist the grip it has on them" (S.P. 31-32/27).
To this I would add that despite our different points of view, let us say of
178 Polysemiosis
our "framing of the field", it seems to me that our probIematics of
analytic singularity overlap.
But before settling on this point, I would like to make a more general
remark regarding our shared dispute against Lacanian and related the-
ories in order to underline the fact that our dispute was never accompa-
nied by a neopositivist or Marxist negation of the problem of the
unconscious. The History of Sexuality brought to the fore the decisive
nature of the break that Freudianism carried out with respect to what
Foucault called the "series composed of perversion-heredity-degenere-
scence", that is, the solid nucleus of the technologies of sex at the tum of
the last century (II.S. vol. I. 157/118-119, 197-198/149-150). As De-
leuze and myself are concerned, one must recall that we were rebelling
against the attempt to reconstruct a panicular form of analysis, namely,
the Lacanian pretension of erecting a universal logic of the signifier that
would account for not only the economy of subjectivity and of the affects
but also of all the other discursive forms relating to an, knowledge, and
power.
Let us now return to the feature that aligns us, perhaps more than any
other, with Foucault, namely, a common refusal to expel those dimen-
sions of singularity of the analytic object and its procedures of elucida-
tion: "The theme of universal mediation", Foucault writes, "is yet
another manner of eliding the reality of discourse. And this despite
appearances. At first sight it would seem that, to discover the movement
of a logos everywhere elevating singularities into concepts, finally enab-
ling immediate consciousness to deploy all the rationality in the world, is
cenainly to place discourse at the center of speculation. But, in truth, this
logos is really only another discourse already in operation, or rather, it is
things and events themselves which insensibly become discourse in the
unfolding of the essential secrets" (O.D. 50-1/228). This return to
singularity rests, in Foucault, on his very distinct conception of the
statement as no longer representing a unity of the same son as the
sentence, the proposition, or the speech-act. Consequently, the state-
ment, for Foucault, no longer functions on the authority of a segment of
a universal logos leveling out existential contingencies. Its proper domain
is therefore no longer simply that of a relation of signification, aniculat-
ing the relationship between signifier and signified, nor of the relation of
the denotation of a referent. For it is also a capacity of exisuntial produc-
tion (which, to use my terminology, I call a diagrammatic function). In its
mode of being singular, the Foucauldian statement is neither quite
linguistic, nor exclusively material. It is, nevertheless, crucial that we be
able to state whether or not we are dealing with a sentence, proposition,
or speech act. "The statement is not therefore a structure . It IS a
function of existence that properly belongs to signs and on the basis of
Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire 179
which one may then decide, through analysis or intuition, whether or not
they 'make sense' ." (A.S. 115/86).
Is not thIs intersection between the semiotic function of meaning, the
denotative and this pragmatic function of mise en existence
precisely on that which all psychoanalytic experience turns - with its
symptomatic indexes, witticisms, its lapses, its "dream navels" [ombilics
du rive], failed actions, its fantastical training and behavioralism clutch-
ing as it is onto its own existential repetition that is empty of meaning, or
at the very least, empty in a pragmatic sense in the coordinates of
dominant meanings? Whether he was traversing the "discourses" of
collective instruments (for example, that of hospitals or prisons), the
marking of bodies and of sexuality, the history of the emergence of the
figures of reason and madness, or even the mechanical worlds of a
Raymond Roussel (R.R. 120/93), Foucault's primary research was al-
ways concerned with the rifts of discourse, that is, the ruptures of
meaning of ordinary language or of scientific discursivity. Foucault's
objective was always that of carrying out a mapping of large groups of
statements as a "series of interwining lacunas and interplays of differen-
ces, distances, substitutions, and transformations" He never accepted as
self-evident the view that these groups of statements are to be charac-
terized as "full, tightly packed, continuous, [and] geographically well-
defined" (A.S. 52/37) [t.m.]. When following Foucault on this terrain,
one senses at times a connection with the dissident logic of the Freudian
primary processes.
4
While this is true, Foucault's concept of singularity,
whose importance I have already underlined, nevertheless differs pro-
foundly from this logic in two ways.
First, one must never forget that Foucault undertook, indeed, in every
way possible, to dismantle the false appearance of the individuation of
subjectivity. I have already mentioned the subjugating function of social
individuation - what Foucault calls "government of individualization" -
which at once individualizes and totalizes (M.F. 302/212-13), and
which, by means of a faceless gaze "transforms the whole social body into
a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile atten-
tions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network ." (S.P. 216/214).
But this function is not necessarily exercised by a clearly defined rational
social operator such as a caste in control of a state or by the executive
administration of a political party. It may involve an intentionality without
subject (H.S. vol. I. 124-25/94-95) proceeding from "collective surfaces
and inscriptions" (A.S. 56/41). Panoptic control, for example, leads to
the subjectification of those who observe as much as those who are
observed. It is an apparatus wherein no one has exclusive authority, and
where "everyone is caught, those who exercise power just as much an
those over whom it is exercised" (P. 156). In a more general way, we
180 Polysemiosis
need to keep in mind that there exists no statement - in the Foucauldian
sense - that would be free, neutral, and independent. Statements are
always an integral part of an associated field; it is only because they are
immersed in an enunciative field that they can emerge in their singularity
(A.S. 130/99).
This perspective also led Foucault to reconsider the status of the
author at the level of the most basic procedures of the delimitation and
control of discourse. For Foucault, the author is not to be identified with
the speaking individual who has -delivered or written a text, but as a
"unifying principle of discourse" - which on my part, I have called a
"collective assemblage of enunciation" - t ~ t gives this discourse its
unity, its gesture, its meaning, as the seat of its coherence (O.D. 28/221)
[t.m.].
Secondly, the way Foucault positions the question of the existential
singularities also constitutes a potential, but decisive, departure from the
Freudian manner of approaching the fonns of the unconscious, or "un-
thought" [impensee] to use a tenn inspired by the work of Blanchot. The
individual as ruptured is no longer synonymous with singularity, and can
no longer be conceived of as an irreducible point of escape from the
systems of relations and representation. Even the cogito has lost its
character of apodictic certainty to become, in a way, processual; it is now
understood as "a ceaseless task constantly to be undertaken afresh"
(M.C. 335/324). Singularity is fonned or undone according to the hold
of the SUbjective strength of the collective and/or individual discursivity.
Let us say, by way of returning to the context of our particular categories,
that singularity has to do with a process of singularization in so far as it
comes to exist as a collective assemblage of enunciation. With this aim in
view, singularity can just as well embody itself through a collective
discourse as it can lose itself in a serialized individuation. And even when
it concerns an individual entity, it might very well continue to be a matter
of processual multiplicities. This is not to say, however, that in becoming
fragmented, precarious, and in freeing itself from its identitarian fetters a
singularity is necessarily led to impoverish or weaken itself. On the
contrary: it affirms itself. At least that is the orientation proposed by
Foucault's micropolitics of the "analytic of finitude", breaking complete-
ly as it does with the analytic of representations issuing from the Kantian
tradition. It would therefore be a serious misinterpretation to restrict his
perspective to one type of global intervention of the subjectification of
the social body. For Foucault's perspective is also, and above all, a
micropolitics of existence and desire. Finitude, in this perspective, is not
something that one resignedly endures as a loss, a deficiency, a mutila-
tion, or castration. Rather, finitude entails existential affinnation and
commitment.
5
All the themes that we might call Foucauldian existential-
Microphysics of PowerlMicropolitics of Desire 181
ism converge on this pivotal point between semiotic representation and
the pragmatics of "existentialization", and, in this way, places the micro-
politics of desire_alongside the microphysics of power according to spe-
cific procedures: Each of these themes demands to be reinvented, one at
a time, and case by case, in a process akin to artistic creation. Foucault's
immense contribution lies in its exploration of the fundamentally polit-
ical fields of subjectification, as well as the guiding light of a micropolitics
that frees us from the pseudo-universals of Freudianism or the Lacanian
mathemes of the unconscious. As a result of the methods he articulated,
the lessons we can derive from his intellectual and personal development,
as well as from the aesthetic character of his work, Foucault has left us
with a number of invaluable instruments for an analytic cartography.
Notes
This conference paper, "Microphysique des pouvoirs el micropolitique des desirs",
presented in Milan at a colloquium devoted to the work of Foucault, was published in us
Annees d'hiver 1980--1985 (paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986), pp. 207-222.
i See also the theme of the "labyrinth of origins n in the work of Raymond Roussel (R. R.
204/162).
2 We were on our part fighting, during this very period, against what we called the
"imperialism of the signifier". Were our positions separated here by slightly different
nuances? Or is there perhaps a prevalence in Foucault of the role played by the
"classical age" in this hold of power of the signifier over power in general - whereas
Deleuze and I emphasized the dimensions of the signifier as they related to advanced
capitalism?
3 For the production of the domains of objects, see O.D. 711234; for that of events: O.D.
611231; of the soul: S.P. 34/29; that of sex: H.S. vol. 1.1'>1/114, etc.
4 If one is to take seriously the assertion that struggle is at the heart of power relations,
then one must realize that the good old "logic of contradiction is no longer sufficient,
far from it, for the unraveling of actual processes", P. 30/164.
Translated by John Caruana
PART V
QueerlSubjectivities
16
Three Billion Perverts on the Stand
1 Prefatory Note
The object of this file - homosexualities, today, in France - cannot be
approached without questioning again the standard methods of rcsearcl:
in the social sciences where, under a pretext of objectivity, all care i!
taken to maximize the distance between the researcher and the object 0:
study. To arrive at the radical decentering of scientific enunciation tha,
is required for the analysis of such a phenomenon, it is not sufficient t{
"give voice" to the subjects concerned - which at times amounts to ~
formal, even Jesuitical, intervention. Rather, it is necessary to create th(
conditions for a total, indeed a paroxysmic, exercise of that enunciation
Science should have nothing to do with just measures and compromise!
for the sake of good taste! It is not readily apparent how to break througt
the barriers of established knowledge, in fact of dominant power. At leas'
three sorts of censure must be thwarted:
that of the pseudo-objectivity of social surveys, in the manner, fOl
example, of the Kinsey Report transposed onto the "sexual beha
viour of the French" - which contain a priori all possible responses,
and in such a way as not to reveal to the public anything that doe!
not accord with what the observer and the director of the s t u ~
wish to hear;
that of psychoanalytic prejudices which pre-organize a psychological,
topical and economic "comprehension" - in fact a recuperation - 01
homosexuality, such that, with the persistence of the most tradi
tional sexology, will continue to be held within a clinical frame-
work of perversion, which implicitly justifies all the forms 01
repression it has suffered. Here, then, there will be no question 01
"fixation" at the pre-genital, pre-oedipal, pre-symbolic or pre-any-
thing stages, which would define the homosexual as lacking some-
thing at the very least normality and morality. Far from
depending on an "identification with the same-sex parent", homosex-
ual maneuvering effects a break with all possible adequation to a
186 QueeriSubjectivities
prominent parental pole. Far from resolving itself by fixation on
the Same, it is an opening into Difference. For the homosexual,
refusal of castration does not indicate a shrinking from his or her
social responsibilities, but rather, at least potentially, indicates an
attempt to expunge all normalizing, identificatory processes - pro-
cesses which are, fundamentally, no more than the remnants of the
most archaic rituals of submission;
that, finally, of traditional militant homosexuality. Likewise, in this
domain, the period of the "Case of Uncle Tom" has passed. Here,
the defense of the legitiJ:llate and unassailable claims of oppressed
minorities will no longer be at issue; and no question, either, of a
quasi-ethnographic exploration of a mysterious "third
sex" Homosexuals speak for us all - speak in the name of the
silent majority - by putting into question all forms, whatever thay
may be, of desiring-production. Nothing in the order of artistic
creation or of revolution can be accomplished in ignorance of their
questioning. The era of homosexual geniuses, who set about sep-
arating and diverting their creativity from their homosexuality,
forcing themselves to conceal that their creative spirit originated in
that very break with the established order, has now passed.
Incidentally, for the deaf: the gay, no more than the shizo, is not of
himself a revolutionary - the revolutionary of modem times! We are
simply saying that, among others, he could be, could become, a site for an
imponant libidinal disruption in society - a point of emergence for
revolutionary, desiring-energy from which classical militantism remains
cut off. We do not lose sight, insofar as it also exists, of an infinitely
unfonunate commitment to asylums, or an indefinitely shameful and
miserable oedipal homosexuality. And yet, even with these cases of
extreme repression, one should stay in touch.
May '68 taught us to read the writing on the walls, and, since then, we
have begun to decipher the graffiti in prisons, asylums, and now in
urinals. There is a "new scientific spint" to recapture!
2 A Letter to the Court
In recent years, the position of homosexuals in society has greatly
evolved. In this area, as in many others, one observes a discrepancy
between reality and psychiatric theory, medical-legal and juridical prac-
tice. Homosexuality is less and less felt to be a shameful malady, a
monstrous deviance, a crime. This evolution has become increasingly
Three Billion Perverts on the Stand IS'
pronounced May '6S, when the forces of social struggle took OJ
previously neglected causes, such as life in prisons and in asylums, th,
condition of women, the question of abortion, of quality of life, etc
There has been, moreover, a homosexual political movement which
considering homosexuals to be a marginal minority, has defended thei
human dignity and demanded their rights. Some of these movements, iJ
the United States for example, have joined forces with other protes
groups: movements against the Vietnam War, civil rights movements fo
Blacks, Porto Ricans, feminist movements, and so on.
In France, this evolution has been different. The revolutionary move
ment, the FHAR [Front homosexuel d'actWn re'lJolutionnaire] , was launchel
with a political agenda right from the start. There was no conjunction 0
marginal homosexual movements with political movements: the prob
lems of homosexuality were immediately posed as political questions
This spontaneist Maoist movement, formed around the journal Tout
the product of May '68 - refused not only to accept that homosexualit:
was an illness or a perversion, but advanced the view that it concerned al
normal sexual life. Similarly, the women's liberation movement, tho
MLF [Mou'lJement de liberation des femmes], argued that feminine homo
sexuality was not only a form of struggle against male chauvinism, bu
also a radical questioning of all dominant forms of sexuality.
Homosexuality would be, thus, not only an element in the life of eacl
and everyone, but involved in any number of social phenomena, such a
hierarchy, bureaucracy, etc. The question has thus been shifted: homo
sexual men and women refuse the status of an oppressed minority, an<
intend to lead a political offensive against the enslavement of all forms 0
sexuality to a system of reproduction, and to the values of bureaucratil
capitalist and socialist societies. This is, in fact, more about transsex
uality than homosexuality: at issue is the definition of what
would be in a society freed from capitalist exploitation and the alienatiol
it engenders on all levels of social organization. From this perspective
the struggle for the liberty of homosexuality becomes an integral part 0
the struggle for social liberation.
The ideas arising from this line of thought were explored in the issut
of Recherches for which I have been charged - as the director of tht
pUblication for "affronting public decency" In fact, the problem!
raised by this issue of Recherches are fundamentally, and only, political
The charge of pornography is merely a pretext, all too easily invoked ir
this particular domain; the main thing is suppression for the sake of "ar
example"
Recherches, in addition to a number of current publications, endeavon
to break with the practice common to radio, television, and most print
media of selecting information according to reigning prejudices, 01
188 QueeriSubjectivilies
making themselves the judges of decency and indecency, of transposing
the voice of those concerned by a particular problem into a language
deemed acceptable, in short, of substituting themselves. On the situation
in prisons, for example, one would solicit commentary from a judge, a
policeman, a former prisoner (one of exceptional character - one, for
example, who had committed a crime of passion), but never from an
average prisoner. The same applies for mental illness. At a push, one
might bring forward an insane genius, but never would one seek out
actual witnesses to the miserable life of a psychiatric hospital.
We wanted, therefore, to give direct voice to homosexuals. And the
result? We are reproached for our impropriety. But of what nature is
this impropriety, if it is not political? In fact, what is said in this issue
of Recherches, and in the manner in which it is said, is clearly less than
what can be found not only in publications for sex-shops - our goal
was hardly to compete! but also in scientific publications. The
originality of the issue - that which shocks, and for which we are charged
- lies in that for perhaps the first time, homosexuals and non-homosex-
uals speak of these problems for themselves and in an entirely free
manner.
3 17th Magistrate's Court
(Notes for the trial)
- I will not repeat the terms of my letter to the court; it seems, as Mr.
Kiejman has advised me, that this would have a negative effect,
- I am summoned as the director of the journal Recherches for its special
issue on homosexuality: "Three Billion Perverts: An Encyclopedia of
Homosexualities" ,
- what does the fact that I am held responsible for this issue signify?
Recherches is the expression of a group
this issue, in particular, was collectively produced
all of its participants asked to be charged
- what does the fact of holding someone responsible for something
signify?
I am responsible, I represent Recherches
you represent the law
Three BiUion Perverts on the Stand 189
members of Parliament represent the people
the President of the Republic: France
universfries: knowledge
gays: perversion
- Recherches wishes to ~ v done with this sort of representation, with all
the bad theatre to which officials and institutions resort.
What we want is to give voice to those who never manage to be
heard.
- At CERFI [Centre d'etudes, de recherches et de formations institutionnel-
les], we are often questioned on the issues surrounding these problems.
It is, undoubtedly, for those who are interested to seek answers them-
selves! Sometimes, however, we cannot restrain ourselves from express-
ing our own ideas.
- Recently, the Minister of Justice asked us if we would agree to study
what the "spatial disposition of a Law Court" could be.
There is at least one comment that I could make at the moment: that
is that judges should be in the room, and that speakers, whoever they may
be, should face the public.
- Can one speak seriously in a Court?
when I was a young militant, I would have refused to participate in
this "masquerade",
I would have said to you: "So, now, to express myself freely in a
journal, one must pay. Fine. Write up the bill and we won't waste
any more time" And I would have thrown you a fistful of bills or
change for the bailiffs to pick up.
Then you would have sentenced me with contempt of court and
everyone would have been satisfied!
now I think a bit differently. I know that things go on everywhere,
even in the magistrature, even in the police, even in the prefecture,
finally, then, this trial interests me: I would like to know if every-
thing was played out in advance, if everything was already inscribed
in the "pharmacopoeia" of laws. In this case, then, I grant you,
in advance, that this issue of Recherches is indefensible. (Even
though, I am sure, Mr. Merleau-Ponty, Mr. Kiejman and Mr.
Domenach would know how to prove otherwise!)
- What purposes do texts serve: whether it be a text of law or a text
of Recherches? Are they not inseparable from the social relations that
190 QueerlSubjectiviries
underlie them, and from what linguists call the context, the implicit?
Isn't the important thing to look at life itself, at the evolution of what one
could call the "jurisprudence of everyday life"? One would see that
homosexuality has evolved in recent years - at the very least, its "custom-
ary law" - and it is of that which we must speak.
- But before continuing, I would like to ask you two things, Your
Honour, for the enrichment of our proceedings:
1 have all the witnesses, up to the present, enter
2 give free voice to everyone in the room who asks to speak.
This affair has two sides:
- a ridiculous side,
- a serious side.
The ridiculous side: In April of 1973, I was in Canada participating in an
extremely interesting conference. Unfortunately, I could not delay my
return to France because of consultations that I could not reschedule.
Arriving home in Paris, suitcases in hand, I found several people with
whom I had appointments sitting in the stairway, in front of my pad-
locked door.
It took me a moment to realize that the padlock, roughly screwed on
the door (which cost me 150 francs to repair), had been put there by
the police after searching the premises. The two statutory witnesses
to this search had been, in my absence, my upstairs neighbours
and the locksmith! All of my papers and my clothes had been
gone through, and the bathroom turned upside down. During this
time, ten police officers had undertaken a similar search of the clinic of
La Borde where I work. Dozens of search warrants had been is-
sued. To what end? It defies belief! To find copies of the seized issue
of Recherches, while that same issue was on sale in bookstores, and had
been for weeks!
When I protested these proceedings to the examining judge, I must say
that he remained largely perplexed. I thought then that there had been a
mistake and that the case would be adjourned sine die.
The serious side: What exactly caused such a commotion? The content or
\
a) The content of the issue
The content is certainly exceptionally rich, particularly insofar as it
involved:
- the position of the homosexual in society,
- the way in which different immigrant groups from North Africa live
their homosexuality,
- the sexual misery of young people,
Three Billion Perverts on the Stand 191
- the racist fantasies which are sometimes invoked in relations of sexual
dependence, etc.
- mastutbation: some extremely interesting accounts of this relatively
unknown siibject were brought together. But it would require at least
three hours for the witnesses summoned today to deal with these differ-
ent subjects.
b) The/orm o/the issue
It is the form that was the target of repression, undoubtedly because
the issue doesn't fit into any pre-established category:
- it's not an "art" book,
- nor is it a porno magazine,
- nor an erotic novel for the elite,
- and nor is it a text that austerely presents itself as a scientific com-
munication.
We dispensed here with the notions of an author and a work. When the
examining judge asked me, for example, who had written this or that
article, supposing I would even answer, I was not able to do so. More
often than not, the articles were, in effect, made up of reports, discus-
sions, and montages of text, which makes it impossible to determine
individual responsibility! Even the layout was done collectively, and
certain sentences were taken directly from graffiti! How can the law
determine who is responsible! Rather than asking questions regarding the
substance, one has opted for the ease of holding responsible: the legal
director!
- Is it irresponsible to allow people to speak, without precautions,
without supporting documentation, and without a pseudo-scientific
screen? (Even . though scientific research, at a second level, works with
documents as up to date).
How otherwise to conceive of a study, whether it be in psychiatry,
pedagogy, or in areas that concern justice?
Is it really dangerous to let people speak ofthings as they feel them, and
with their language, their passions, their excesses?
Must we institute a police for dreams and fantasies? For what good do
we suppress the public expression of popular spontaneity on the walls -
or in the subways, as in New York. .?
How can we not understand that to forbid expression, on this level, is
to favor a transition to actions that will present undoubtedly larger
inconveniences to the social organization?
We think that the expression of desire is synonymous with disorder and
irrationality .
But the neurotic order that forces desire to conform to dominant
models perhaps constitutes the real disorder, the real irrationality.
It is repression that makes sexuality shameful and sometimes aggressive.
192 QueeriSubjeczivities
Desire that can open itself up to the world ceases to be destructive and
can even become creative.
This trial is political. It makes a cause of a new approach to daily life,
to desire, and the new forms of expression that have irrupted since 1968.
Will we finally allow people to express themselves without having
recourse to "representatives"? Will we allow them to produce their own
journals, their own literature, theatre, cinema, etc.?
Violence engenders violence.
If we repress the new forms of expression of social desire, we will head
for absolute revolt, desperate reactions, even, indeed, for forms of collec-
tive suicide (as was, in certain respects, Hiderian fascism).
Thus, it's for the judges to choose as well. Do they situate themselves,
a priori, on the side of the dominant order?
Or are they capable of giving a hearing to another order that seeks to
build another world?
Notes
"Trois miUiarrh tk pervers Ii la barre" appeared in Guattari's La rWoiuli07l molkuJaiTt (Fonten-
ay-sous-Bois: EncreslRecherches, 1977), pp. 110-119. A note is added to the effect that:
"The March issue of RechercMs, 'Three Billion Perverts: An Encyclopedia of Homosex-
ualities', had been seized, and Felix Guattari, as the publications director, was fined 600
francs for affronting public decency. No. 12 of. RechercMs was judged to constitute a
'detailed display ofturpitude and sexual deviation', the 'libidinous exhibition of a minority
of perverts'. All copies ofthe issue were ordered to be destroyed"
Translated by Sophie 1'homilS
17
Subjectivities: for Better and for
Worse
My professional acttvltles in the areas of psychopathology and psy-
chotherapy, along with my political and cultural engagements, have led
me to place an increasing emphasis on subjectivity insofar as it is pro-
duced by individual, collective and institutional factors.
To consider subjectivity from the perspective of its production in no
way implies, I suggest, a return to traditional systems of determination
involving a material infrastructure and an ideological superstructure.
The different semiotic registers that contribute to the engendering of
subjectivity do not maintain obligatory, hierarchical relations that are
ftxed once and for all. It could happen, for example, that economic
semiotization becomes dependent on collective psychological factors, as
one sees with the sensitivity of stock market indexes to fluctuations of
opinion. In fact, subjectivity is plural polyphonic, to borrow a term'
preferred by Mikhail Bakhtin. It is not constituted by a dominant,
determining factor that directs other factors according to a univocal
causality.
Three considerations lead us to enlarge the definition of subjectivity in
such a way as to bypass the classical opposition between the individual
subject and society, and thereby to revise the models of the Unconscious
that currently obtain: the irruption of subjective factors into the fore-
ground of historical events, the massive development of machinic pro-
ductions of subjectivity and, finally, the recent focus on ethologic and
ecologic factors in human subjectivity.
Over the course of history, subjective factors have always held an
important place. Now, however, since their global diffusion through the
mass media, it seems they are coming to playa dominant role. We will
retain here, in summary fashion, only two examples. The immense
movement unleashed by Chinese students evidently had political demo-
cratization as its goal. But it is equally certain that its contagious, affec-
tive burden went beyond simple ideological demands. At issue were
other factors: a whole- lifestyle, a whole conception of social relations, and
a collective ethic. And, ultimately, the tanks achieved nothing. As in
194 Queer/Subjectivilies
Hungary or in Poland, a collective, existential mutation will have the last
word! But large movements for sUbjectivation do not necessarily move in
an emancipatory direction. The immense subjective revolution that has
mobilized the Iranian people for more than a decade has, as its focal
point, religious archaisms and globally conservative social attitudes
particularly with respect to the condition of women. In a general way,
one could say that contemporary history is increasingly dominated by the
escalation of claims that are singularly subjective: linguistic quarrels,
demands for autonomy, questions of nation and nationalist One
must admit that a certain universalist respresentation of subjectivity, as it
had been embodied by the capitalistic colonialism of the West and the
East, is now bankrupt, and we are unable to measure fully the conse-
quences of such a failure.
Must we keep the semiotic productions of the mass media, of compu-
ters, of telecommunications, robotics, etc., outside of psychological sub-
jectivity? I don't think so. In the same way as the social machines that we
classify under the general rubric of "collective apparatuses", technolog-
ical machines for information and communication operate at the heart of
human subjectivity - not only within its memories and intelligence, but
also within its sensibilities, affects, and unconscious fantasies. Taking
into account these machinic components of subjectivation brings us to
insist, in our redefinition, on the heterogeneity of the components
converging to produce subjectivity. These components contain signifying
semiological dimensions, but also a-signifying semiotic dimensions,
which escape properly linguistic axiomatics. It was a serious error on
the part of structuralist thinking to claim to bring together every-
thing concerning the psyche under the sole direction of the linguistic
signifier! Machinic transformations of subjectivity constrain us to take
into account a heterogenesis, rather than a universalizing and reductionist
homogenization, of subjectivity. So it is that "computer assistance"
leads to the production of images or, again, to the resolution of mathe-
matical problems that would have been unimaginable only a few de-
cades ago. But there, too, one must guard against all mechanistic causal
thought. The machinic production of subjectivity can work for the bet-
ter as for the worse. At best, it is creation - the invention of new universes
of reference; and at its worst, it is the mind-numbing mass mediatiza-
tion to which billions of individuals today are condemned. Technologi-
cal evolutions, combined with social experimentation in these new
areas, will perhaps be able to lead us out of the oppressive present
moment and into a "post-media" era, which would be characterized by
a reappropriation and a re-singularization of the use of the media (ac-
cess to data bases, viqeotheques, interactivity between protagonists,
etc.).
Subjeclivities: for Bener and for Worse 195
In this same train of thought, where subjectivity is understood as
polyphonic and heterogeneous, we find that its ethological and ecological
aspects are accounted for. Daniel Stem, in The Imerpersonai World of the
Infant, explored in a remarkable fashion the pre-verbal subjective fonnu-
lations of the infant. I He demonstrates that it is not at all a question of
stages, in the Freudian sense, but rather levels of subjectivation which are
sustained in a parallel fonnation throughout life. He thus renounces
Freudian complexes, which had been presented as structural "univer-
sals" of subjectivity, as overrated in psychogenesis. On the other hand, he
emphasizes the initially trans-subjective character of the early experien-
ces of the infant, who does not dissociate a sense of self from a sense of
other. It is a dialectic between "sharable affects" and "non-sharable
affects" that so structures emergent subjectivity. Subjectivity, that is, in its
nascent state that we continually recover in dream, delirium, creative
elation, feelings of love
Social ecology and mental ecology have found privileged sites for
exploration in the experiments of institutional psychotherapy. I am
thinking in particular of La Borde, the clinic where I have worked for a long
time, and where everything has been done so that the mentally ill can live
in a climate of activity and of responsibility on all levels (which involves
a permanent mobilization of staft). In such a context, one perceives that
the most heterogeneous dimensions contribute to the positive develop-
ment of a patient: relations to architectural space, economic relations,
co-management by the patient and care giver of the different vectors of
treatment, the seizing of all opportunities of exposure to the outside, and
the processual development offactual "singularities" - finally, everything
that can contribute to the creation of an authentic relation to the other.
To each of these components of the institution of care corresponds a
necessary practice. That is, one is not before a subjectivity that is given,
such as the en soi, but rather facing a process of assuming autonomy, or
of autopoesis, in the sense given the tenn by Francisco Varela.
2
I will take as a final example the way family psychotherapy has taken
advantage of the ethological capacity of the psyche, particularly in the
body of thought developing around the work of Mony Elkaim, which
attempts to free itself from the grip of the systemist theories which are
currently in use in Anglo-Saxon countries and in Italy.'
The inventiveness of treatments for family therapy, as they are con-
ceived here, distance us from scientistic paradigms and draw near instead
to ethico-aesthetic paradigms. The therapist is engaged, takes risks, and
doesn't hesitate to weigh in with his or her own fantasies, and to create
an atmosphere that is, paradoxically, one of existential authenticity
which nevertheless allows for freedom of play. Another remarkable point
is the fact that during the training of family therapists, the simulated
196 QueeriSubjectivitW
situations become, in a way, more real than life, which demonstrates the
"creationist" character that has taken the stage of family therapy.
Whether we tum to contemporary history, to machinic semiotic pro-
duction, or to social ecology or mental ecology, we find the same ques-
tioning of individuation, of a subjectivity that is only, in sum, a
configuration of collective assemblages of enunciation. From where we are
now, the most inclusive provisional definition of subjectivity that I would
propose is: "the set of conditions that make it possible for individual
and/or collective factors to emerge as a sui-referential exislentiailerrieory,
adjacent or in a determining position to an alterity that is itself subjec-
tive" In this way, in cenain social and semiological contexts, subjectivity
individuates itself; a person, held as responsible for him- or herself,
positions him- or herself among relations of alterity that are governed by
the family, by local customs, by law Under other conditions, subjec-
tivity is collectively formed, which does not mean that it becomes, for all
that, exclusively social. In fact, the term "collective" should be under-
stood here in the sense of a multiplicity that develops beyond the individ-
ual, on the side of the socius, as well as on this side (so to speak) of the
person, that is, on the side of pre-verbal intensities that arise more from
a logic of the affects than from a well-circumscribed, comprehensive
logic.
The conditions of production evoked in my sketch of a definition thus
jointly implicate intersubjective human factors manifested in language,
and suggestive or identificatory factors arising from ethology, from ma-
chinic mechanisms such as those having recourse to computer assistance,
from different institutions, from universes of non-corporeal reference,
such as the world of music, that of the plastic arts
Returning to the question of the unconscious Freud postulated
the existence of a continent hidden from the psyche, within which the
essential workings of drives, affects, and cognitions was to be found.
Today, one cannot dissociate theories of the unconscious from psycho-
analytic, psychotherapeutic, institutional, literary (and so on) practices,
which make reference to it. The unconscious has become an institution,
a "collective assemblage" in the broadest sense. The unconscious is
imposed upon us as soon as we dream, or are delirious, or commit an acte
manqui, or a Zapsus Undoubtedly, Freudian discoveries - which I
prefer to qualify as inventions - have increased the angles from which one
can approach the psyche today. And it is not at all in a pejorative sense
that I speak of invention! In the same way that Christians invented a new
formula for subjectivation, as did courtly chivalry, or romanticism, or
Bolshevism, various Freudian groups have generated a new way to feel,
to live, to produce hysteria, infantile neurosis, psychosis, family conduct,
a reading of myths, etc. The Freudian unconscious has itself evolved over
Subjectivities: for Better andfor Worse 197
the course ofits history: it has lost the ebullient richness and disturbing
atheism of ~ orgins, and has been recentered on the analysis of the self,
the adaptation of society or, in its structuralist versions, conformity to the
signifying order.
From my own perspective, which is guided by a shift of human and
social sciences from "scientistic" paradigms to ethico-aesthetic ones, the
question is no longer one of knowing if the Freudian unconscious or
the Lacanian unconscious offers scientific solutions to the problems of
the psyche. The models will only be considered as one among others
for the production of subjectivity, inseparable from the technical and
institutional mechanisms that support them, and from their impact on
psychiatry, on university teaching, the mass media. In a more
general way, one will have to admit that each individual, each social
group, conveys its own system of modelling unconscious subjectivity,
that is, a certain cartography made up of reference points that are
cognitive, but also mythic, ritualistic, and symptomatological, and on the
basis of which it positions itself in relation to its affects, its anxieties, and
attempts to manage its various inhibitions and drives. Moreover, today,
our question is not only of a speculative order, but has practical implica-
tions: do the models of the unconscious that are offered us on the
"market" of psychoanalysis meet current conditions for the production of
subjectivity? Is it necessary to transform them, or to invent new ones?
What processes are set in motion in the awareness of an inhabitual shock?
How do modifications to a mode of thinking, to an aptitude for the
apprehension of a changing external world, take effect? How do repre-
sentations of the external world change as it changes? The Freudian
unconscious is inseparable from a society that is attached to its past, to its
phallocratic traditions, and its SUbjective variants. Contemporary uphea-
vals undoubtedly call for a modelization turned more toward the future
and to the emergence of new social and aesthetic practices in all areas. On
the one hand, the devaluation of the meaning oflife provokes the fragmen-
tation of self-image: representations of self become confused and contra-
dictory while, on the other hand, the conservative forces of resistance
oppose themselves to all change, which is experienced by a secure, ossi-
fied, and dogmatic consciousness as an attempt at destabilization.
Gilles Deleuze and I have similarly refused the Conscious-Uncon-
scious dualism of Freudian issues, and all the Manicheanist oppositions
that follow on the level of oedipal triangulation, castration complex, etc.
We opted for an unconscious of superimposed, multiple strata of subjec-
tivations, heterogeneous strata of development with greater and lesser
consistency. An unconscious, thus, that is more "schizo", liberated from
familialist yokes, and turned more toward current praxis than toward
fixations and regressions on the past. An unconscious offlux and abstract
198 QueerlSubjectivieies
machines, more than an unconscious of structure and language. Never-
theless, we do not propose our "schizoanalytic cartographies" as scien-
tific doctrines. Just as an artist borrows elements that suit him from his
precursors and contemporaries, we invite our readers to freely take and
leave the concepts we advance. The important thing is not the final
result, but the fact that the cartographic method coexists with the process
of subjectivation, and that a reappropriation, an autopoesis of the means
of production of subjectivity, are made possible.
It must be clear that we are not assimilating psychosis to a work of art,
and the analyst to an artist! We are only stating that their way of assuming
their existence engages a dimension of autonomy that is of an aesthetic
order. Therein lies a crucial ethical choice: either we objectify, we reify,
we "scientifize" subjectivity, or else we attempt to seize it in its dimen-
sion of processual creativity. Kant emphasized that the judgement of
taste engaged subjectivity and its relation to others in a certain modality
of "disinterestedness" 4 But it is not enough to designate these categories
of liberty and disinterestedness as essential dimensions of the aesthetic
unconscious; one must still account for their effective mode of insertion
into the psyche. How do certain semiotic segments acquire their auto-
nomy, putting themselves to work to generate new fields of reference? It
is on the basis of such a rupture that an existential singularization,
consecutive to the genesis of new coefficients of freedom, will become
possible. Such a detachment of a "partial object" from the field of
dominant significations corresponds at the same time to the promotion
of a mutant desire and to the consummation of a certain disinterested-
ness. Here, we find the terms used by Bakhtin in his first theoretical essay
of 1924,
5
where he placed in luminous relief the function of enunciative
appropriation of aesthetic form by the isolation or detachment of the
cognitive and ethical content, and the consummation of that content in the
aesthetic object, which I would qualify as a partial enunciator. Bakhtin
describes a transfer of subjectivation that operates between the author-
creator and the contemplator of a work - the "onlooker" of Marcel
Duchamp. For him, the recipient becomes, to some extent, a co-creator
in this movement. Aesthetic form doesn't arrive at this end only by means
of the functions of isolation or detachment, of a sort that renders the
expressive matter formally creative. The content of the work detaches
itself from its cognitive as much as its ethical connotations: "isolation or
detachment relates not to the material, not to the work as a thing, but to
its significance, to its content, which is freed from certain necessary
connections with the unity of nature and the unity of the ethical event of
being" (306). It is, thus, a certain segment of content that takes hold of
the author-creator, that engenders a certain mode of aesthetic utterance.
Bakhtin reminds us that in music, for example, "isolation and construc-
Subjectivities: for Better and for Worse 199
tedness canri-ot be axiologically related to the material: it is not the sound
of acoustics"-ihat is isolated and not the mathematical number of the
compositional order that is made up. What is detached and fictively
irreversible is the event of striving, the axiological tensions, which ac-
tualizes itself thanks to that without any impediment, and becomes
consummated" (307).
Creative subjectivity in poetry, in order to detach itself, to become
autonomous, and in order to be consummated, will preferably seize
upon:
1 the phonic side of a word, its musical aspect;
2 its material significations, with their nuances and variations;
3 its qualities of verbal connection or interrelation;
4 its intonational aspects, both emotional and volitional;
5 the feeling of verbal activity in the active generation ofa signifying
sound that involves motor elements of articulation, gesture, mi-
micry - a feeling of movement that draws in the whole organism,
the activity and the soul of a word in their concrete unity.
Evidently, this last aspect encompasses the others.
6
These ingenious analyses of Bakhtin, which I can only skim over here,
lead me to enlarge his approach with respect to partial subjectivation. It
is not only in music and poetry that we see such fragments of content
detached from the work which, in a general way, I would place in the
category of existential refrains. The polyphony of modes of subjectivation
in fact corresponds to a multiplicity of ways to "beat time" Other
rhythmics are also brought to crystallize what I will call existential
enunciations, which they incarnate and singularize .. A complex refrain -
short of those of music and poetry - marks the intersection of heteroge-
neous modes of subjectivation. Time has long been considered a univer-
sal and univocal category, while in reality, we have none other than
particular and multivocal apprehensions of it. Universal time is just a
hypothetical projection of modes of temporalization which arise from
moduleslof intensity-refrains - which operate simultaneously in several
registers: biologic, socio-cultural, machinic, cosmic, etc.
To illustrate this mode of production of polyphonic subjectivity where
the refrain-intersection plays a dominating role, we might consider the
example of televisual consumption. As soon as I watch television, I exist
simultaneously in a relation of perceptive fascination to the luminous
center of the apparatus which verges on hypnotism,
1
and in a relation of
captivity to the narrative content of the program, associated at the same
200 Queer/Subjectivities
time with a lateral vigilance with regard to surrounding events (water
boiling on the stove, a child's cry, a telephone .), and, behind it all, the
fantasies inhabiting my reverie, etc. This means that, in spite of the
diversity of the subjectivation components that traverse me, I am one, it
is this refrain-ing [ritournellisation] that fixes me in front of the screen,
which is from then on constituted as a projective existential territory. Like
Bakhtin, I would say that the refrain does not rest on the elements of
form, material, or ordinary signification, but on the detachment of an
existential "motif' (or leitmotif) instituted as an "attractor" in the midst
of sensible and significational chaos.
The most simple cases of refrains for the delimitation of existential
territory can be found in the ethology of several species of birds, where
specific song sequences serve different purposes: the seduction of a
sexual panner, the distancing of intruders, and the announcement of the
arrival of predators.
8
In each case, a precise functional space must be
defined. In archaic societies, it is on the basis of rhythms, songs, dances,
masks, inscriptions on the body, on the ground, on totems, rituals and
mythic references that other kinds of collective existential territories are
circumscribed.
9
These kinds of refrains are found in Greek antiquity,
with "nomes" which constitute, in some way, "acoustic indicators", and
flags and seals for professional corporations. But we are all familiar with
such crossings of the thresholds of subjective states by the activity of a
subjective, catalyzing, temporal module that plunges us into sadness, or
else into a state of gaiety and animation. With our concept of the refrain,
we aim not only at such massive effects, but at hypercomplex problema-
tics. Take, for example, the entry into the incorporeal worlds of music or
mathematics. These are not cases, we suggest, of universes of reference
"in general", but of singular universes, historically marked at the inter-
section of diverse lines of virtuality. In this type of register, time ceases to
be subjected: it is acted, oriented, polarized, the object of qualitative
mutations. Analysis is no longer the interpretation of symptoms accord-
ing to a pre-existent, latent content, but the invention of new catalytic
centers susceptible of bifurcating experience. A singularity, a rupture in
sense, a cut, fragmentation, the detachment of semiotic content - for
example, in a dadaist or surrealist fashion - can be at the origin of mutant
centers of subjectivation. Just as chemistry had to begin by purifying
complex mixtures in order to extract homogeneous atomic and molecu-
lar matter, and then to create from them an infinite array of chemical
entities that had not existed previously, the "extraction" and "separ-
ation" of aesthetic subjectivites or panial objects, in the psychoanalytic
sense, facilitates an immense complexification of subjectivity, of new and
unprecedented existential harmonies, poiyphonies, rhythms and orches-
tration.
Subjectivilies: for Beuer and for Worse 201
-
In this way, the primacy of the machinically-generated information
flow has led to a generalized dissolution of ancient territorialities_ In the
early phases of industrialized societies, the "demonic" continued to
appear everywhere, but henceforth mystery became an increasingly rare
commodity. It is sufficient here to evoke the desperate quest ofa Witkie-
wicz to seize an ultimate "mysteriousness of existence" that seemed
literally to slip between his fingers.
lo
In these conditions, it falls especially to the poetic function to recon-
struct universes of subjectivation that are artificially rarified and re-sin-
gularized. However, it is not for that function to transmit messages, to
invest in images as support for identification, or in fonnal patterns as
props for modelization procedures, but to catalyze the existential opera-
tors capable of acquiring consistency and persistency within the current
mass-media chaos.
This poetico-existential catalysis, found in action amid its scriptural,
vocal, musical or plastic discursivities, engages quasi-synchronically the
enunciative recrystallization of the creator, the interpreter, and the con-
sumer of the work of art. Its efficiency resides essentially in its capacity
to promote active or processual ruptures within semiotically structured
significational and denotational fabric, from which it produces new
universes of reference.
When it is effectively released into a given enunciative zone - situated,
that is to say, from a historical and geopolitical point of view - such a
poetic function is thus instituted as a mutant center of auto-referentia-
tion and auto-valorization. This is why it must always be considered from
two perspectives: as a molecular rupture, an imperceptible bifurcation,
capable of overturning the framework of dominant redundancies, the
organization of the "already classified" or, if one prefers, the order of the
classical, and secondly as it selects certain segments of these very lines of
redundancy, in order to confer upon them the existential, a-signifying
function that I have just evoked, to render them "refrains", to make of
them virulent fragments of partial enunciation which work to "shift"
sUbjectivation. The quality of the base material is unimportant here, as it
is with repetitive music or Buto dance which, as Marcel Duchamp has it,
are completely turned toward the "onlooker" Of primordial importance,
however, is the mutant, rhythmic trajectory of a temporalization that is
capable of holding together the heterogeneous components of a new
existential structure.
Beyond the poetic function lies the question of the mechanisms of
subjectivation, and, more precisely, what characterizes these mechanisms
so that they move out of seriality - in Sartre's sense
ll
- and into processes
of singularization, which restore to existence what one might call its auto-
essentialization. We are entering an epoch where, the antagonisms of the
202 QueerlSubjectivities
cold war having receded, there appear even more distinctly the major
threats that our productivist societies have imposed upon the human
species, whose survival on this planet is threatened not only by environ-
mental deterioration, but also by the degeneration of social solidarities
and modes of psychic life that will literally have to be reinvented. The
remaking of politics must pass through aesthetic dimensions that are
implicated in the three ecologies of the environment, the socius, and the
psyche. A response to the poisoning of the atmosphere, and global
warming due to the greenhouse effect, is inconceivable without a muta-
tion of mentalities, without the advancement of a new art of living.
International cooperation in this area is inconceivable without finding
solutions for the problems of famine in the world, and hyper-inflation in
the Third World. We cannot conceive of a restructuring of the mass
media toward a collective reappropriation of their use, that is not conse-
quent upon a re-singularization of subjectivity, a new way of conceiving
political and economic democracy, in the area of cultural differences. We
cannot hope for an amelioration in the living conditions of the human
species without considerable effort to advance the condition of women.
The division of labor, its modes of valorization and its purposes must be
rethought. Production for the sake of production, obsession with the
growth rate, whether it be on the capitalist market or in socialist econ-
omies, leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable end result of
human activity is the production of subjectivity such that its relation to
the world is sustained and enriched. The mechanisms of the production
of subjectivity can be on the scale of the megalopolis as well as on that of
the language games of a poet. To apprehend the inner workings of this
production, its fundamental ruptures of the meanings of existence,
poetry, today, has perhaps more to teach us than the economic and
human sciences put together.
Notes
This article was published as a "Colloque" under the title of I : . : ~ subjectivilCs, pour Ie
meilleur et pour Ie pire", Chimeres 8 (1990): 23-37. The journal Chimeres was founded by
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in 1987.
1 Daniel Stem, u Mande interpersannel du naumsson (P.U.F., 1985). (The Interpersonal
World of th Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (New
York: Basic Books, 1985).]
2 F. Varela, Auwnomie et connaissance (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989).
3 Mony Elkaim, Si tu m 'aimes, ne m 'aime pas (Paris: Le Seuil, 1989). (If You Love Me,
Don't Love Me: Constructions of Reality and Change in Family Therapy], trans. Hendon
Chubb (New York: Basic Books, 1990); See Guanari's review of this book, "La famille
selon ElkaIm", Le Mandt (10 mai 1989): 17.
4 "We may say that, of all these three kinds of liking (the agreeable, the beautiful, and
the good), only the liking involved in taste for the beautiful is disinterested and free,
s..ri!Jjectivities: for Berter andfor Worse 203
since we are not compelled to give our approval by any interest, whether of sense or of
reason" Immanuel ~ t Critique tk /afaculrJ tkjuger (Vrin, 1986), pp. 54-55. [The
Critique ofJudgmleru, trans. Werner S.Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hacken Publishing, 1987),
p.52.]
5 "Le probleme du contenu, du materiau et de la forme dans I'oeuvre lineraire", in
Esthetiqru et theo,;, du roman (Gallimard, 1978). ("The Problem of Content, Material,
and Form in Verbal An", trans. Kenneth Brostrom, in Art and Answerability: Early
Philosophical Essays by M.M.Bakhtin, Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, cds.
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).]
6 Bakhtin, p. 308-9.
7 On the question of the "'return" in hypnotism and suggestion, see Le Coeur et la misan.
L 'hypnose en question tk Lavoisier Ii Lacan, Leon Chenok and Isabelle Stengers (Paris:
Payot, 1989).
8 Guanari, L '/nconscient machini4ue (paris: Editions Recherches, 1979).
9 See the role of dreams in the mythic cartographies of Australian aboriginals, Barbara
Glowezewski, Les Reveurs du desert (paris: Pion, 1989).
10 The reference is to the Polish playwright, painter and philosopher Stanislaw 19nacy
Witkiewicz (1885-1939), or "'Witkacy" as he referred to himself. Witkacy developed a
theory and practice of a non-naturalistic, arealistic theatre which he called "Pure
Form", whose goal was to arouse "metaphysical feeling through a grasp of formal
constructions", even if the laner were necessarily impure given that works are created
by individuals and thus constitute "individualized Form". See "Pure Form in the
Theatre" [1921], in The Witkiewic.II' Reatkr, cd. and trans. Daniel Gerould (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1992), pp. 147-52.
11 Sartre theorizes what he calls serial being in Book I, Chapter 4, on "Collectivities" in
The Criliqru of Dialectical Reason, Vol I, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left
Books, 1976), p. 256ft'. Briefly, the members of a series are united in being turned
towards an exterior object, in which they have a common interest, without having a
project in common and without necessarily being aware of one another. The unity of
the series is not active, rather, it is passive and contingent because it is prefabricated.
Trans/a"d by Sophie Thomas
18
A Liberation of Desire
An Interview by George Stambolian
GEORGE STAMBOLIAN - In 1970 the authorities forbade the sale to minors
of Pierre Guyotat's novel Eden. Eden. Eden. More recently they outlawed
and seized the special issue of the review Recherches ("Encyclopedie des
homosexualites") to which you had made important contributions. You
were even taken to court on the matter. How would you explain these
reactions by the French government.
FELIX GVATTARI - They were rather old-fashioned reactions. I do not
think that the present government would behave the same way because
there is, on the surface at least, a certain nonchalance regarding the
literary and cinematographic expression of sexuality. But I don't have to
tell you that this is an even more subtle, cunning, and repressive policy.
During the trial the judges were completely ill at ease with what they were
being asked to do.
GS - Wasn't it because this issue of Recherches treated homosexuality,
and not just sexuality?
FG - I'm not sure, because among the things that most shocked the
judges was one of the most original parts of this work - a discussion of
masturbation. I think that a work devoted to homosexuality in a more or
less traditional manner would have had no difficulty. What shocked
perhaps was the expression of sexuality going in all directions. And then
there were the illustrations - they were what set it off.
GS - In your opinion, what is the best way to arrive at a true sexual
liberation, and what dangers confront this liberation?
FG - The problem as I see it is not a sexual liberation but a liberation of
desire. Once desire is specified as sexuality, it enters into forms of
particularized power, into the stratification of castes, of styles, of sexual
classes. The sexual liberation - for example, of homosexuals, or transves-
tites, or sadomasochists - belongs to a series of other liberation problems
among which there is an a priori and evident solidarity, the need to
participate in a necessary fight. But I don't consider that to be a libera-
tion as such of desire, since in each of these groups and movements one
finds repressive systems.
A Liberation 0/ Desire 205
GS - What do you mean by "desire"?
FG - For Gilles Deleuze and me desire is everything that exists be/ore the
opposition between subject and object, before representation and produc-
tion. It's everything whereby the world and affects constitute us outside
of ourselves, in spite of ourselves. It's everything that overflows from us.
That's why we define it as flow (flux]. Within this context we were led to
forge a new notion in order to specify in what way this kind of desire is
not some sort of undifferentiated magma, and thereby dangerous, sus-
picious, or incestuous. So we speak of machines, of "desiring ma-
chines", in order to indicate that there is as yet no question here of
"structure", that is, of any subjective position, objective redundancy, or
coordinates of reference. Machines arrange and connect flows. They do
not recognize distinctions between persons, organs, material flows, and
semiotic flows.
GS - Your remarks on sexuality reveal a similar rejection of established
distinctions. You have said, for example, that all forms of sexuality are
minority forms and reveal themselves as being irreducible to homo-hete-
ro oppositions. You have also said that these forms are nevertheless
closer to homosexuality and to what you call a "feminine becoming" [un
devenir femininJ. Would you develop this idea, in particular by defming
what you mean by "feminine"?
FG - Yes, that was a very ambiguous formulation. What I mean is that
the relation to the body, what I call the semiotics of the body, is some-
thing specifically repressed by the capitalist- socialist-bureaucratic sys-
tem. So I would say that each time the body is emphasized in a situation
- by dancers, by homosexuals, etc. - something breaks with the dominant
semiotics that crush these semiotics of the body. In heterosexual rela-
tions as well, when a man becomes body, he becomes feminine. In a
certain way, a successful heterosexual relation becomes homosexual and
feminine. This does not at all mean that I am speaking of women as such;
that's where the ambiguity lies, because the feminine relation itself can
lose the semiotics of the body and become phallocentric. So it is only by
provocation that I say feminine, because I would say first that there is
only one sexuality, it is homosexual; there is only one sexuality, it is
feminine. But I would add finally: there is only one sexuality, it is neither
masculine, nor feminine, nor infantile; it is something that is ultimately
flow, body. It seems to me that in true love there is always a moment
when the man is no longer a man. This does not mean that he becomes
a woman. But because of her alienation woman is relatively closer to the
situation of desire. And in a sense, perhaps from the point of view of
representation, to accede to desire implies for a man first a position of
homosexuality as such, and second a feminine becoming. But I would
add as well a becoming as animal, or a becoming as plant, a becoming as
206 QueerlSubjectivities
cosmos, etc. That's why this formulation is very tentative and ambigu-
ous.
GS - Isn't your formulation based in part on the fact that our civilization
has associated body and woman?
FG - No, it's because woman has preserved the surfaces of the body, a
bodily jouissance and pleasure much greater than that of man. He has
concentrated his libido on - one can't even say his penis - on domina-
tion, on the rupture of ejaculation: "I possessed you", "I had you" Look
at all the expressions like these used by men: "I screwed you", "I made
her" It's no longer the totality of the body's surface that counts, it's just
this sign of power: "I dominated you", "I marked you" This obsession
with power is such that man ultimately denies himself all sexuality. On
the other hand, in order to exist as body he is obliged to beg his sexual
partners to transform him a bit into a woman or a homosexual. I don't
know if homosexuals can easily accept what I'm saying, because I don't
mean to say that homosexuals are women. That would be a misunder-
standing. But I think that in a certain way there is a kind of interac-
tion between the situation of male homosexuals, of transvestites, and
of women. There is a kind of common struggle in their relation to the
body.
GS - "Interaction", "transformation", "becoming", "flow" - these words
suggest a recognition of our sexual or psychic multiplicity and fluidity
which, as I understand it, is an essential aspect of what you call schi-
zoanalysis. What then is the basic difference between schizoanalysis and
psychoanalysis which, I believe, you have completely abandoned.
FG - I was Lacan's student, I was analyzed by Lacan, and I practiced
psychoanalysis for twelve years; and now I've broken with that practice.
Psychoanalysis transforms and deforms the unconscious by forcing it to
pass through the grid of its system of inscription and representation. For
psychoanalysis the unconscious is always already there, genetically pro-
grammed, structured, and finalized on objectives of conformity to social
norms. For schizoanalysis it's a question of constructing an unconscious,
not only with phrases but with all possible semiotic means, and not only
with individuals or relations between individuals, but also with groups,
with physiological and perceptual systems, with machines, struggles, and
arrangements of every nature. There's no question here of transference,
interpretation, or delegation of power to a specialist.
GS - Do you believe that psychoanalysis has deformed not only the
unconscious but the interpretation of life in general and perhaps of
literature as we1\?
FG - Yes, but even beyond what one imagines, in the sense that it's not
simply a question of psychoanalysts or even of psychoanalytical ideas as
they are propagated in the commercial press or in the unive-rsities, but of
A Liberation of Desire 207
and representational attitudes toward desire that one finds
in persons who don't know psychoanalysis, but who put themselves in
the position of interpreters, of gurus, and who generalize the technique
of transference.
GS - With Deleuze, you have just finished a schizoanalysis of Kafka's
work. Why this method to analyze and to comprehend literature?
FG - It's not a ql.\,estion of method or of doctrine. It's simply that I've
been living with Kafka for a very long time. I therefore tried, together
with Deleuze, to put into our work the part of me that was, in a way, a
becoming of Kafka. In a sense the book is a schizoanalysis of our relation
to Kafka's work, but also of the period of Vienna in 1920 and of a certain
bureaucratic eros which crystallized in that period, and which fascinated
Kafka.
GS - In a long note you speak of Kafka's joy, and you suggest that
psychoanalysis has found only Kafka's sadness or his tragic aspect.
FG - In his Dianes Kafka gives us a glimpse of the diabolic pleasure he
found in his writing. He says that it was a kind of demonic world he
entered at night to work. I think that everything that produces the
violence, richness, and incredible humor of Kafka's work belongs to this
world of his.
GS - Aren't you really proposing that creation is something joyful, and
that this joy can't be reduced to a psychosis?
FG - Absolutely - or to a lack.
GS - In the on Kafka you say that a "minor literature", which
is produced by a minority in a major language, always "deterritorializes"
that language, connects the individual to politics, and gives everything a
collective value. These are for you, in fact, the revolutionary qualities of
any literature within the established one. Does homosexuality necessarily
produce a literature having these three qualities?
FG Unfortunately, no. There are certainly homosexual writers who
conduct thcir writing in the form of an oedipal homosexuality. Even very
great writers - I think of Gide. Apart from a few works, Gide always
transcribed his homosexuality and in a sense betrayed it.
GS - Despitc the fact that he tried to prove the value of homosexuality
in works such as Corydon?
FG - Yes, but I wonder if he did it in just one part of his work, and if the
rest of his writing isn't different.
GS - In the Anti-Oedipe you and Deleuze note that Proust described two
types of homosexuality - one that is Oedipal and therefore exclusive,
global, and neurotic, and one that is a-Oedipal or inclusive, partial, and
localized. In fact, the latter is for you an expression of what you call
"transsexuality" So if there are two Gides, aren't there also two Prousts,
or at least the possibility of two different readings of his work?
208 QueerlSubjecrivities
FG - I can't answer for Proust the man, but it seems to me that his work
does present the two aspects, and one can justify the two readings
because both things in effect exist.
GS - You spoke of the demonic in Kafka. Well, Gide, Proust, and Genet
have been accused of being fascinated by the demonic aspect of homo-
sexuality. Would you agree?
FG - To a point. I wonder sometimes, not specifically concerning the
three names you mention, if it isn't a matter of persons who were more
fascinated by the demonic than by homosexuality. Isn't homosexuality a
means of access to the demonic? That is, they are the heirs of Goethe in
a certain way, and what Goethe called the demonic was in itself a
dimension of mystery.
GS - But the fact remains that in our civilization homosexuality is often
associated with the demonic.
FG - Yes, but so is crime. There's a whole genre of crime literature that
contains a similar demonic aspect. The demonic or the mysterious is
really a residue of desire in the social world. There are so few places for
mystery that one looks for it everywhere, in anything that escapes or
becomes marginal. For example, there's something demonic in the life of
a movie star. That's why it's used by the sensational press.
GS - Doesn't that tell us that we are hungry for the demonic; that we are
hungry for things that aren't "natural"; that we have exploited movie
stars and homosexuals to satisfy our need for the demonic?
FG - I'm not against that because I'm not at all for nature. Therefore
artifice, the artificially demonic, is something that rather channs me.
Only it is one thing to live it in a relationship of immediate desire, and
another thing to transform it into a repressive machine.
GS - Let's go back to the homosexual writers. I'd like to quote here a
remark of yours that struck me. It's the last paragraph of you interview
published in the August 1975 issue of La Quinzaine litteraire. You say:
"Everything that breaks something, everything that breaks with the es-
tablished order, has something to do with homosexuality, or with a
becoming as animal, a becoming as woman, etc. Any break in semiotici-
zation implies a break in sexuality. It is therefore not necessary, in my
opinion, to raise the question of homosexual writers, but rather to look
for what is homosexual, in any case, in a great writer, even ifhe is in other
respects heterosexual" Doesn't this idea contain a new way to approach
or perhaps to go beyond a question that has obsessed certain Freudian
critics and psychoanalysts - namely, the connection between homosex-
uality, or all sexuality, and creativity?
FG - Yes, of course. For me, a literary machine starts itself, or can start
itself, when writing connects with other machines of desire. I'd like to
talk about Virginia Woolf in her relation to a becoming as man which is
A Liberation of Desire 209
itself a becoming as woman, because the paradox is complete. I'm
thinking about a book I like very much, Orlando. You have this character
who follows the course of the story as a man, and in the second part of
the novel he becomes a woman. Well, Virginia Woolf herself was a
woman, but one sees that in order to become a woman writer, she had to
follow a certain trajectory of a becoming as woman, and for that she had
to begin by being a man. One could certainly find in George Sand things
perhaps more remarkable than this. So my question is whether writing as
such, the signifier as such, relates to nothing, only to itself, or to power.
Writing begins to function in something else, as for example for the Beat
Generation in the relation with drugs; for Kerouac in the relation with
travel, or with mountains, with yoga. Then something begins to vibrate,
begins to function. Rhythms appear, a need, a desire to speak. Where is
it possible for a writer to start this literary machine if it isn't precisely
outside of writing and of the field of literature. A break in sexuality -
therefore homosexuality, a becoming as woman, as addict, as missionary,
who knows? It's a factory, the means of transmitting energy to a writing
machine.
GS - Can a break in semiotization precede a break in sexuality?
FG - It's not a break in semiotization, but a semiotic connection. I'll give
you a more f ~ m i l i r example. Take what are called mad people from a
poor background from the point of view of intellectual formation
peasants who"have never read anything, who have gone only to grade
school. Well, when they have an attack of dissociation, a psychotic
attack, it happens sometimes that they begin to write, to paint, to express
extraordinary things, extraordinarily beautiful and poetic! And when they
are "cured", they return to the fields, to the sugar-beets and asparagus,
and they don't write any more at all. You have something of a psychotic
attack like that in Rimbaud. When he became normal, he went into
commerce; all that stopped. It's always a question of a connection.
Something that was a little scholastic writing machine, really without any
quality, connects with fabulously perceptive semiotics that start in psy-
chosis, or in drugs, or in war, and that can animate this little writing
machine and produce extraordinary things. You have a group of discon-
nected machines, and at a given moment there is a transmission among
them, and everything begins not only to function but to produce an
acceleration of operations. So you see, I'm not talking about sexuality.
Sexuality is already specified as sex, caste, forms of sexual practice,
sexual ritual. But creativity and desire are for me the same thing, the
same formula.
GS - I'd still like to ask you the following question. Could you begin the
search for what is homosexual in a heterosexual writer with a great writer
like, for example, Beckett, whose work offers us a "homosexuality" which
210 QueerlSubjectivities
seems at times to be the product of extraordinary semiotic connections,
and which, in any case, confounds all previous representations and goes
beyond them?
FG - I think of those characters who travel by twos and who have no
sexual practice because they live completely outside of sexuality, but who
nevertheless represent a kind of collective set-up of enunciation, a collec-
tive way of perceiving everything that happens. And so many things are
happening that it's necessary to select, to narrow down, in order to
receive and distill each element, as if one were using a microscope to
capture each of the intensities. Indeed, there is perhaps in Beckett a
movement outside of the sexes, but then there is the absolutely fabulous
relation to objects, a sexual relation to objects. I'm thinking of the
sucking stones in Molloy.
GS Then how does one explain the elements of homosexuality, of
sadomasochism, in his work?
FG - But that's theater, because if there's a constant in Beckett's work,
it's that even when he writes novels, he creates theater, in the sense of a
mise en scene, a mise en acte, of giving something to be seen. So then
inevitably, he gathers up representations, but he aniculates them to
create literature. What's more, Beckett is someone, I think, who was very
interested in the insane, in psychopathology, and therefore he picked up
a lot of representations. The use he makes of them is essentially literary,
of course, but what he uses them for is not a translation, it's a college, it's
like a dance. He plays with these representations, or rather, he makes
them play.
GS - You said in your anicle on the cinema
l
that any representation
expresses a certain position with respect to power. But I wonder if
Beckett hasn't succeeded in writing a politically "innocent" text.
FG - I t:lo more believe in innocence than I do in nature. One thing
should be made clear - if one finds innocence, there's reason to worry,
there's reason to look not for guilt, of course, because that's the same
thing as innocence, it's symmetry, but for what is politically in germina-
tion, for a politics en pointilte. Take Kafka again. Although his text isn't
innocent, the supremely innocent character is K., and yet he is neither
innocent nor guilty. He's waiting to enter a political scene. That's not
fiction; it's not Borges, because he did enter a political scene in Prague,
where one of the biggest political dramas was played around Kafka's
work. So, innocence is always the anticipation of a political problem.
GS - Everything that's written is therefore linked in one way or another
to a political position?
FG Yes, with two fundamental axes: everything that's written in
refusing the connection with the referent, with reality, implies a politics
of individuation of the subject and of the object, of a turning of r i t i n
A Liberation of Desire 211
on itself, and by that puts itself in the service of all hierarchies, of all
centralized systems of power, and of what Deleuze and I call "arbores-
cences", the regime of unifiable multiplicities. The second axis, in oppo-
sition to arborescence, is that of the "rhizome", the regime of pure
multiplicities. It's what even innocent texts, even gratuitous games like
those of the Dadaists, even collages, cut-ups, perhaps especially these
things, will make possible one day to reveal - the pattern of similar breaks
in reality, in the social field, and in the field of economic, cosmic, and
other flows.
GS - So sexual liberation is not going to rid us of political connections.
FG - Sexual liberation is a mystification. I believe in, and will fight for,
the taking of power by other castes and sexual systems, but I believe that
liberation will occur when sexuality becomes desire, and that desire is the
freedom to be sexual, that is, to be something else at the same time.
GS How does one escape from this dilemma in which one caste
replaces another?
FG - What these liberation movements will reveal by their failures and
difficulties is that there really aren't any castes. There's the possibility
that society will reform itself through other types of subjective arrange-
ments that are not based on individuals. in constellation or on relations of
power that co;ttmunication institutes between speaker and listener.
There will be arrangements, I don't know what, based neither on
families, nor on communes, nor on groups, where the goals of life,
politics, and work will always be conjugated with the analysis of uncon-
scious relations, of relations of micro-power, of micro-fascism. On the
day when these movements fix as their goals not only the liberation of
homosexuals, women, and children, but also the struggle against them-
selves in their constant power relations, in their relation of alienation, of
repression against their bodies, their thoughts, their ways of speaking,
then indeed, we will see another kind of struggle appear, another kind of
possibility. The micro-fascist elements in all our relations with others
must be found, because when we fight on the molecular level, we'll have
a much better chance of preventing a truly fascist, a macro-fascist forma-
tion on the molar level.
GS - You and Delcuze often speak of Artaud, who wanted to rid us of
masterpieces and perhaps even of written texts. Can one say that the
written text already contains a form of micro-fascism?
FG - No, because a written text can be lengthened. Graffiti in the street
can be erased or added to. A written text can be contradictory, can be
made into a palimpsest. It can be something extremely alive. What is
much less alive is a work, une oeuvre (and Artaud himself did not write a
work) or a book. But then one never writes a book. One picks up on
books that have been written; one places oneself in a phylum. To write a
212 QueerlSubjectivities
book that wants to be an eternal and universal manual, yes, you're right;
but to write after one thing and before another, that means participating
in a chain, in a chain of love as well.
GS - I'd like to return for a moment to what you said about desire and
the problem of liberation. I think of people who might profit from that
kind of formulation in order to circumvent the question of homosexuality
and the specificity of this struggle, by saying that all that is just sexuality
and that sexuality alone matters.
FG - I'm very sympathetic to what you say. It's a bit like what they say
to us regarding the struggle of the working class. I understand that, but
I'd still like to give the same answer: it's up to the homosexuals. I'm not
a worker or a homosexual. I'm a homosexual in my own way, but I'm not
a homosexual in the world of reality or of the group.
GS - Yes, but the theories one proposes on homosexuality are always
important, and they are never innocent. Before writing Corydon, Gide
read theories. Before writing La recherche, Proust was totally aware of the
psychological thought of his time. Even Genet was influenced after the
fact by the theories ofSartre. Obviously, it's often writers themselves who
are the first to see things that others transform into theories. I'm thinking
of Dostoevsky, Proust, and of course, Kafka. You've already begun to use
your own theories to study the literatUre of the past, and they are related
perhaps to what may someday be called a 'literature of desire' Writers,
critics, and homosexuals have the choice of accepting or rejecting these
theories, or of playing with them. But they can neither forget them nor
ignore the words of moralists, psychoanalysts, and philosophers, cer-
tainly not today and certainly not in France.
FG - Right, I completely agree. It's truly a pollution. But in any case,
what do you think ofthe few theoretical propositions I've advanced here?
It's my turn to question you.
GS - Judging your position by what you've said here and by what you've
written, I think that you and Dcleuze have seriously questioned Freud's
system. You have turned our attention away from the individual and
toward the group, and you have shown to what extent the whole Oedipal
structure reflects our society's paranoia and has become an instrument
for interiorizing social and political oppression. Also, I'd like to quote the
following passage from the Anti-Oedipe: "We are heterosexuals statisti-
cally or in molar terms, but homosexuals personally, whether we know it
or not, and finally transsexuals elementarily, molecularly" I can't claim
to understand fully this or other aspects of your theory, but you do show
that the time has come to address ourselves to the question of sexuality
in another way, and that's a kind of liberation.
FG - Well, I want to say to those people who say 'all that is sexuality' that
they must go farther and try to see what in fact is the sexuality not only
A Liberation of Desire 213
of the homosexual, but also of the sadomasochist, the transvestite, the
prostitute, even the murderer, anyone for that matter, in order not to go
in the direction of reassurance. They must see what a terrible world of
repression they will enter.
GS - Despite the passage from your work I just quoted, when you speak
you often cite groups that are always outside the dominant field of
heterosexuality .
FG - For me desire is always 'outside'; it always belongs to a minority.
For me there is no heterosexual sexuality. Once there's heterosexuality,
in fact, once there's marriage, there's no more desire, no more sexuality.
In all my twenty-five years of work in the field I've never seen a hetero-
sexual married couple that functioned along the line of desire. Never.
They don't exist. So don't say that I'm marginalizing sexuality with
homosexuals, etc., because for me there is no heterosexuality possible.
GS - Following the same logic there is no homosexuality possible.
FG - In a sense yes, because in a sense homosexuality is counterdepend-
ent on heterosexuality. Part of the problem is the reduction of the body.
It's the impossibility of becoming a totally sexed body. The sexed body
is something that includes all perceptions, everything that occurs in the
mind. The problem is how to sexualize the body, how to make bodies
desire, vibrate - all aspects of the body.
GS - There are still the fantasies each of us brings. That's often what's
interesting in some homosexual writing - this expression of fantasies that
are very specialized, very specific.
FG - I don't think it's in terms of fantasies that things are played but in
terms of representations. There are fantasies of representations. In desire
what functions are semiotic flows of a totally different nature, including
verbal flows. It's not fantasies; it's something that functions, words that
function, speech, rhythms, poetry. A phantasmal representation in
poetry is never the essential thing, no more than is the content. Phantasy
is always related to content. What counts is expression, the way express-
ion connects with the body. For example, poetry is a rhythm that trans-
mits itself to the body, to perception. A phantasy when it operates does
not do so as a phantasy that represents a content, but as something that
puts into play, that brings out something that carries us away, that draws
us, that locks us onto something.
GS - Aren't there phantasies ofform as well?
FG - Phantasies of form, phantasies of expression, become in effect
micro-fascistic crystallizations. This implies, for example, in scenes of
power of a sadomasochistic character: 'Put yourself in exactly this posi-
tion. Follow this scenario so that it will produce in me such an effect'.
That becomes a kind of phantasy of form, but what counts there is not
the application of the phantasy, it's the relation to the other person, it's
214 QueerlSubjectivilies
complicity! Desire escapes from formal redundancies, escapes from
power formations. Desire is not informed, informing; it's not information
or content. Desire is not something that deforms, but that disconnects,
changes, modifies, organizes other forms, and then abandons them.
GS - So, a literary text escapes all categorization as well as any sexuality
that can be called one thing or another?
FG - Take any literary work you love very much. Well, you will see that
you love it because it is for you a panicular form of sexuality or desire, I
leave the term to you. The first time I made love with Joyce while reading
Ulysses was absolutely unforgettable! It was extraordinary! I made love
with Kafka, and I think one can say that, truly.
GS - Proust said it: 'To love Balzac; to love Baudelaire' And he was
speaking of a love that could not be reduced to anyone definition.
FG - Absolutely. And one doesn't make love in the same way with Joyce
as with Kafka. If one began to make love in the same way, there would be
reason to worry - one might be becoming a professor of literature!
GS - Perhaps! Then literature can be a liberation of desire, and the text
is a way of mUltiplying the sexes.
FG - Cettain texts, texts that function. Nothing can be done about those
that don't function. But those that do function mUltiply our functioning.
They turn us into madmen; they make us vibrate.
Notes
This interview appeared in G. Stambolian and Elaine Marks (eds.), HomosexuaJirks and
French I..iterature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979, pp.
56-69. An earlier discussion of queer issues may be found in Guauari, 'Une sexualisation
en rupture' [Interview by C. Deschamps], La Quinzaine liueraire 215 (aout 1975): 14-15.
1 See Guanari, 'Le divan du pauvre', Communications 23 (1975): 96-103.
Translated by George Srambolian
19
Toward a New Perspective on
Identity
An Interview by Jean-Charles Jambon and Nathalie Magnan
J.-C. JAMBON and N. MAGNAN - You invoke subjectivity, an imponant
term in your thought, and one you say gets a bad press. Why?
FEux GUATfARI - Nowadays we try through various means, such as the
mass media and standardized behaviour, to neuroleptize subjectivity.
Subjectivity is both being in a relation to the other, to inventiveness, to
creativity, and at the same time being on the shooting, terrifying thre-
shold of We do not stand before a subjectivity already
given, fitted and rather, we are called to produce it. Confronted
with the conditions we meet constantly in daily life something must be
done, and the key to this action is the question of assuming extremes.
This is just the opposite of turning toward a being already there, already
formed, because being is above all becoming, event, production.
All dominant subjectivity is constructed to prevent this alternative
which I refer to as ch(U)smic, in the interplay between complexity and
chaos. Everything is done to erase what, from the side of creation, of an
opening onto the world, can disturb it. These are the things, however,
that the pubescent world, the emerging homosexual world, homosexual
becoming, knows well
J & M - How do you defme this problematic of becoming? How can it be
related to the problematic of homosexuality?
FG - There is in the question of becoming a paradox related to time. It
is a matter not of a progressivist view of history, but of seeing how
problematizings occur .. From a psychogenetic, psychoanalytic point of
view, homosexuality is the consequence of a pre-Oedipal, pre-genital
fixation it is always pre-something. We are waiting for the proper
genitality, the proper acceptance of castration. You know the song! As for
me, I think that, in order to accede to the ontological dimensions thrown
into question by homosexuality, we must abandon this progressivist view
of time. In effect, it is possible to escape the world of discursivity
structured by the poles masculine - feminine, object - subject ., that
set of dualist categories forever haunted by a transcendent object.
216 QueeriSubjectivities
Escapes are possible which allow access to what I call an intensive,
existential relation, a relation of immanence that no longer posits a
before, an after, a black, a white, a male, a female We are dealing here
with a point of crystallization, existence's point of convergence, which is
not a pure abstraction, a pure idea, but is rather embodied in a relation
to music, to the flesh, in what I call precisely a becoming. This emer-
gence of becoming is linked to a praxis. Put another way, even if we come
to be homosexual, before being homosexual we have to become homo-
sexual, to make ourselves homosexual. Here we have the idea of an
existential praxis of homosexuality, even ifit refers ultimately to the most
banal homosexual conjugality, one which rejoins the world of dominant
significations. We can hardly dispense with the constitution ofmicro-ter-
ritories into which we retreat in order to experience being, to feel recog-
nised. It is a matter of a perspective on identity which has no meaning
unless identities explode. We have to return to an ontological pluralism
which allows you to become homosexual, but not only within a relation
of sex:uality, since it also carries this sexuality into the relation to the
other, into the cosmos, into multiple dimensions. Otherwise, we fall into
the reductionist view of the dominant society, which is of no interest to
me whatsoever.
There is always a double movement, on the one hand of closure, and
on the other of opening, of a bursting of coordinates that risks unbinding,
madness, disorder. This is part of the micro-politics proper to any
oppositional group whose territories also depend on what exists outside,
on what we call macro-politics - together both call into question the
subjectivity I spoke of.
J & M - Reference was often made in the 1960s and 1970s to the notion
of identity. How do you understand the latter?
FG - We must start from a multivalent logic, and accept the notion of
identity which I call existential territory, because we cannot live outside
our bodies, our friends, some sort of human cluster, and at the same
time, we are bursting out of this situation. The question which poses
itself then is one of the conditions which allow the acceptance of the
other, the acceptance of a SUbjective pluralism. It is a matter not only of
tolerating another group, another ethnicity, another sex, but also of a
desire for dis sensus, otherness, difference. Accepting otherness is a ques-
tion not so much of right as of desire. This acceptance is possible
precisely on the condition of assuming the multiplicity within oneself.
J & M Felix Guattari, "who would like, in his way, to stem the
pervading dullness and passivity", never stops, from one book to the
next, envisaging a world of new social practices, new aesthetic practices,
new practices of the self in its relation to the other, the stranger, and the
strange.
Toward a New Penpective on Jdentit.y 217
Notes
This shon interview was originally published in the Parisian gay weekly magazine Gai Pied
Hebdo 532 (August 1992). Gai Pied Hebdo folded in August 1992. This translation appeared
in Ange/4kj 111 (1993): 96-98. The translator Josep-Anton Fernlllldez published a compan-
ion piece in the same issue of Angelaki entitled "Felix Guattari: Toward a Queer Chaos-
mosis" (pp. 99-112) in which he - while drawing on his own experiences of queer cultural
activism in Catalonia - uses G\lattari's transversalist theory of subjectivity to question, on
the one hand, a lingering psychoanalytic sense of failure attached to the invention of queer
identity and to suggest, on the other, what a practice of queer reading based on chaosmic
principles might look like.
Translated by Joseph-Anum Fernandez
20
Genet Regained
Jean Genet died four years after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, while
correcting the proofs of Un capri! amoureux. He writes that the book grew
out of the massacres like a cancer deriving from a single cell whose
subsequent course no one could have predicted. I It is immense, far
exceeding ordinary literary dimensions. Although that may explain why
so many critics have overlooked its true significance, it does not excuse
them.
The book comes in waves. The same scenes, the same characters ride
in with the surf, ten times, twenty times, bringing the flotsam of new
memories. Memories is Genet's modest subtitle for the book: memories,
he says, that should be read as reponing (503). Images, he adds. It is a
book of images, a book of margins providing a field for a singular
polyphony in which the poet's most secret dimensions interlace with the
metaphysical struggles (198 and 448) of the Feyadeen and the Black
Panthers, in counterpoint to Genet's own endless wanderings (427).
He writes that the Palestinian revolution was written on nothingness,
as an artifact in the void, and asks if the white space between the words
is not more real than the black signs themselves (11). Does that mean
that for Genet the revolution was only a pretext to make literature? Then
in what way is he different from the poets of the revolution he so cruelly
mocks? (420) But it is obvious that the routing of his Palestinian experi-
ence through writing is in no way comparable to a vulgar enterprise in
literary recuperation. It never even occurred to him that he could be open
to that accusation.
Of course Genet's visceral rejection of the writer's position, which
would have placed him on the bourgeois side of the barricade, did not
escape Jean-Paul Sanre's notice.
2
But that did not prevent Sanre from
approaching Genet from an exclusively literary angle and considering it
his inescapable destiny to "end" in literature. In hindsight, this appears
to be the reason why.the colossal and sumptuous monument - not to
mention mausoleum - that Sartre built to Genet in the form of a 700
page preface has proven unequal to the breadth of character later dis-
played by Genet. Sartre missed the wellspring of the process that was his
life and work. According to Sartre, Genet underwent three metamor-
Genet Regained 219
phoses: thief, aesthete, and writer. These metamorphoses took him suc-
cessively from act to gesture, from gesture to word, and then from word
to the work (423). By his account, we are dealing with the transformation
of a pervened psychopath into a "rhetoriqueur" who is a captive of the
imagination and whose soul has been duly pacified. "Genet, the sole hero
of his books, has fallen entirely into the imaginary, he becomes the
imaginary in person" (Sanre, 422). Although Sartre's existential psycho-
analysis largely dissociated itself from Freudian conceptions, it is evident
that it retained a certain reductionist schematicism. Or perhaps I should
say reductionist tics. He compares Genet's works to religions on the road
to humanization that replace human sacrifice with symbolic sacrifice
(485); the writing of each of his books functions as a "cathanic anack of
possession" or psychodrama (544); Our Lady of the Flowers is equated
with a detoxication of narcissism (449); and after ten years of literature
that Sanre says are the equivalent of psychoanalytic treatment (544), it
is triumpharltly announced that the patient has been cured and has finally
resolved to start a small family. "Somewhere between Saint-Raphael and
Nice a house is awaiting him. I have seen him there, surrounded with
children, playing_with the older ones and dressing up the younger ones,
passionately dis<:ussing their upbringing" (581). A miracle of literature!
And above all, pure Sartre! Naive, touching, and secretly confonnist. All
that is fine and well, but it is obviously not the way the future was to be.
Genet would never stan a family; he would never "fixate" on a territory
or choose a house, except, to paraphrase Sanre, in the nihilation mode.
This brings to mind the daydream Genet relates in Un captif amoureux of
a home set in a "nonspatial" place (430). The bewitchment is immedi-
ately threatened by the superimposition of another, older image from
Jordan. A high Palestinian official points to a beautiful house and offers
to have the PLO rent it for him. The house suddenly turns dirty and gray
in Genet's mind (433).
Thus Genet did not fall into either aestheticism or literary profession-
alism. Being recognized as one of the century's greatest writers did not
prompt him to end his aesthetic wandering, or even to renounce theft.
Figuratively, he continued to equate theft with poetic apperception;' in
reality, he carefully maintained contact with fonner or potential con-
victs,
1
and on occasion would swindle his editors and parmers, some of
whom, it is said, obligingly accommodated the maneuver. Freudian
psychogenetic stages, even as revised by Sanre, cannot explain why, if
the condition of the writer suited him so well, he was led to end all
literary and dramatic production for twenty years. And what of the
dazzling comeback a few years before his death? In my opinion, the only
way to begin to understand it is to say that "before" the life and "before"
the work there has always been a subterranean process operating in this
220 QueerlSubjectivilies
exceptional being, an essential dynamic, a creative madness that literally
subjugated him. This is what he was getting at in a 1983 interview when
he said that what had enabled him to write an article on Sabra and Shatila
was not the books he had written earlier, but the disposition that had led
to those books.
5
In relation to this primary disposition, the life and work
were always mere by-products. As are the usual dichotomies between the
real and the imaginary. In the same interview, he says that his association
with the Black Panthers and later the Palestinians was more a function of
the real world than the world of dreams or grammar. But he adds: "Of
course, if you take the analysis far enough, it becomes evident that
dreaming also belongs to the real world. Dreams are realities" It is clear
that Genet never progressed through the famous stages of development
and adaptation to the real that according to some authors take shape
around weaning, toilet training, the Oedipus complex and castration,
and pre-and post-pubescent latency periods. For Genet, everything
worked together. He never let go of his dreams and infantile "perver-
sions". But that did not prevent him from being involved in contempor-
ary historical realities in the most lucid, "adult" fashion. I might add that
it would be futile to try to save the psychogenetic schema by recourse to
the structuralistic triad that adds the Symbolic to the Real-Imaginary
dyad. For it is obvious that the triumphant accession to the "symbolic
order" through literature and theater had no redemptive effect in his
case. Sublimation decidedly did not work for him! His writing resulted
not in a dialectical uplifting, but in an exacerbation of his contradictions
and upheavals.
We must look elsewhere, to something that orders the real, the imagin-
ary, and creation in a different way. Something that makes them not
separate agencies but rather mutually engendering. An imaginary-sym-
bolic productive of new realities; a subjective disposition capable of
receiving imaginary charges conveyed by the real. We could legitimately
combine statements in which Genet recoils his subjectivity into the most
"limited" reality with others in which, conversely, the real irrupts outside
of itself in an "objective" process of subjectification. This would provide
us with a smooth transition from the thesis that Un capti! amoureux
is merely reporting, to passages (so surprising from an apologist for
betrayal in all its forms; 367) in which he worries about betraying the
informative mission he was initially assigned because he has ordered the
episodes he lived through in the Palestinian resistance according to
the apparent disorder of dream images (416), to passages in which,
finally, he states that the real is more inventive than his nightmares and
memories (460).
The function of oscillation, eclipse, evanescence, or effacement in the
work of Genet deserves theoretical elaboration. It is a recurring theme.
Genet Regained 221
One of his prototypical images of it is steam on a windowpane. When it
dissipates, the landscape becomes visible again, and it seems that the
room could extend forever (440). Adjacent to this image - for one image
calls forth another - is that of the hand crisscrossing the blackboard
erasing chalk writing (440). Deterritorialization of space, time, and
words. The fedayee is also essentially a disappearing being; in one
passage, a fedayee turns a bend, leaving only his back and his shadow in
view (32). His struggle as such also has to do with eclipse. Genet says
that he watched the resistance as though it would disappear tomorrow
(33). In the final analysis, it i!) Genet who obliterates himself, infinitely
shrinking as he moves toward the horizon (160). But we must be careful
not to present these merely as phenomena of annihilation. These efface-
ments leave trails like stroboscopic afterimages of other universes; their
shadow play heralds the coming to light of other existential dimensions
(407). When he was working on The Screens, he asked that Roger Blin's
production "illuminate the world of the dead";6 there is no doubt that
even what he had in mind was a subjugation of the living. On the eve of
his own death, he sometimes felt that his skin glowed like a lampshade
around a lit bulb (425). It should not be thought, however, that these
transformations h e r ~ l mystical revelations. On the contrary, they par-
ticipate in an entire life's labor on perception, imagination, and their
various modes of semiotization.
It was wrong for Sartre to project onto Genet his conception of the
imaging unconscious as a derealizing function (Sartre, 146). In doing so
he condemned him to encirclement by an imaginary wholly invested by
malevolent phantasmagorias; and he denied him any effective escape
from accursed solitude. It is true that Genet's creative process always
made a strong appeal to fabulation
7
(masturbatory or otherwise) but his
fundamental aim nevertheless remained a poetics with social impact. The
writing of his first texts is inseparable from his experience of the prison
condition. His "theatre of cruelty" revolved around themes of prostitu-
tion, negritude, colonial wars. We must not forget that Un capri! amoure-
ux began as a militant work written on the personal request of Yasser
Arafat, coupled with more general reflections on the movements of the
1960s and after (the Zengakuren, the Red Guards, the Berkeley revolt,
the Black Panthers, May '68 in Paris, the Palestinians; 442). Of course,
he was careful not to give his blanket approval to these revolutionary
undertakings. He rejected their wooden language and dogmatism; he had
a fair estimation of their theatricality for the benefit of the media (390);
and he was remarkably lucid in his denunciation of certain bureaucratic
and corrupt aspects of the Palestinian movement.
s
What fascinated him
was everything in those movements that transcended particular interests,
their fundamental' precariousness as well as their metaphysical concerns.
222 QueerlSubjeclivities
He was especially captivated by one of their essential mechanisms: what
could be called their image function. An example is the ways of being and
dressing adopted by militant Black Panthers, which practically overnight
changed the ways blacks as a whole perceived the color of their skin and
the texture of their hair. Genet saw in these dimensions of the body, sex,
dance, intonations, and gestures, a whole enunciative texture - we could
say a whole eventuation [evenememiation] infinitely more profound than
today's fashion mentality. He speaks of fabulous images whose potency
is based on being at once exemplary and singularizing, and on conspicu-
ousness rather than power (354). I believe that it is valid to enlarge the
scope of this kind of expression to include all imaginary formations,
which then acquire a special capacity to bridge times of life and existen-
tiallevels as well as social segments, and, why not?, even cosmic stratifi-
cations: a capacity of transversality. We must look for Genet in all of
these places simultaneously. This indeed makes him a man of our cen-
tury, one who, perhaps more than any other, brought forth new ways of
seeing. I repeat: Genet is a man of the real. By which I mean, a man of
the future real. He is not a saint, as Sartre pretends to think; and he is
certainly not a saint condemned to perpetually metamorphose into a
vermin, and whose calling it is to convey history into mythic categories
(Sartre, 13). In fact, myths and their images are only important to him to
the extent that collective operators succeed in endowing them with
historical consistency. Under these conditions, becoming a fabulous and
solitary hero who is exemplary and therefore singular (354) is no longer
the opposite of collective fusion (206). Becoming the hero of forms of
sensibility yet to come is in perfect accord with his will to effacement, and
even his desire for invisibility.9 Bringing his dreamer function (206) to
the Panthers and later the Palestinians is not a derealization of these
movements. It is perhaps even a way of endowing them with a more
intense subjective consistency.
I will apply the term "processive praxis" to this creative agency that is
set in place "before" the manifestation of the life and work and that
enables Genet to move from de realizing fabulation to fabulous images
productive of the real. This praxis is composed not of three stages but of
three levels - the modular, the polyphonic, and synaptic.
1 The Level of Modular Crystallizations
A multitude of meaning fragments sweep helter-skelter across the world
and the psyche. Anyone who is highborn, in other words whose reflexes
and mind have been duly normalized, knows how to discipline or silence
these essentially heretical, dissident, and perverse voices. But Genet was
Genet Regained 223
lowborn, and never contemplated a rebirth into the common world.
("1 was always haunted by the idea of a murder that would irremedi-
ably separate me from your world".) Rather than experiencing these
whirlwinds as so many calamities or abysses of anxiety and guilt,
Genet opted to accommodate himself to them, to tame and transmute
them. ("Repudiating the virtues of our world, criminals hopelessly agree
to organize a forbidden universe".) 10 He gains partial control over this
primary processiveness of meaning through rhythms, refrains, pass-
words, and magi co-mnemonic formulas. Sartre had a supberb formula
for Our Lady of the Flowers: he said it was a collection of Genet's
erotic talismans (Sartre, 448). But it is crucial to understand that this
entire labor of primary recrystallization of meaning involves one's per-
ception of the world as much as it does language. I needed to drill into
a language mass, he writes in The Thief's Journal; echoing this in Un
capti! amoureux he describes prison as a world full of ready-made
holes and alveoli, in each of which a man invents a time and rhythm of
his own (442). In the first case, the signifier leads the dance; in the
second, the signified. Actually, the tradUional opposition between
expression and content proves relative and inadequate. What matters
to Genet is not the communication of a message, but the constitu-
tion of an expression that overspills its linguistic components in every
direction (97). The figures of the signifier and those of the signified
must converge in such a way that a matter of expression fenilizes a
context, and, reciprocally, a context imprints its impulses, its paradig-
matic perversions, upon discursive chains of linguistic or nonlinguistic
nature.
Let us consider these various access routes from the angle of a panicu-
larly important module that crystallizes around the names "Fatah" and
"Palestinian" Genet begins by scrutinizing the scriptive manner of
"Fatah" He notes that the word was artificially forged from the Arab
acronym for Palestinian Liberation Movement, FrH (31). Since this does
not help him, he looks to other possibilities for the clandestine germina-
tion of the semantic content. We should note that at this stage he confines
himself to the significations that surface in Arabic; he does not indulge in
"free association" The first significations Fatah yield are crack, fissure,
and God-given victory. Then it yields "mefta", or key, the fact that
"Fatah" conceals three fundamental letters. Then comes "Fatiha", the
FA t ah
m e f ~ T ah
fa ti ~ H
224 QueerISubjectivities
opening sura of the Koran. This triple transformation diagonally recon-
stitutes the original structure ofthe acronym, FA.TH.HA. So here is the
signifier in the position of structural key to the signifier! A child's game,
a philologist's game, exclaims Genet. However, that is not what is
essential. The essential thing is that this association of ideas has enabled
him to join three universes of reference in a single constellation: the
sexual, the divine, and the revolutionary (31). Weare not far from Freud;
but it is Freud in his prime, in the mad years of The Interpretation of
Dreams and Jokes and Their Relation co the Unconscious.
The word "Palestinian" transports us from the terrain of letters and
etymologies (Palestinian = Philistine) to that of phonemes and vocal
timbre. The mere sound of "Palestini ", Genet explains, triggers a
shudder in him, an affect of sadness linked to a key image: a tomb in the
form of a watchful shadow at the foot of a Palestinian fighter (444). This
rectangular shadow is like the label of his singularity, the guarantee of his
total lucidity in the face of death, in contrast to the white world, which
moves without shadows (468). Here we have the same type of modular
schema; light is treated by shadow in numerous variations on the theme
of white and black in relation to writing: Blacks in white America are like
ink on a white page, they are the signs that give history its meaning. II
Beyond Manicheism, the function of the Fatah-Palestinian module
seems to be to connect opposites at the most extreme point of their
antagonism. Even the rivalry between "Palestine will prevail" and "Israel
will live" seems to harbor traces of a hyperparadoxical complicity be-
tween landless peoples of the past and present. It has been said that the
primary quality of the Palestinians is their resolute assumption of fmi-
tude, whereas the Israelis persist in nurturing pernicious dreams of
etemallife.
12
.
I could have taken more deterritorialized modules to illustrate this first,
modular level of processive praxis. I have already mentioned the proble-
matic of drilling holes in the real and language. There is also the flatten-
ing technique applied to Hamza's mother, who is described as being like
a cardboard figure (477); this prior modular treatment is necessary in
order for her to play her key role in the "family romance" Genet forges.
And there is the extraordinary cardless card game that stretches like a red
thread through the entire work, an abstract machine for chipping at and
kneading the real and preparing it for new possibilities. Of course,
modular concatenations similar to these are used to underpin the crea-
tions of many writers. The first example we would have to cite is Proust,
with his procession of leitmoifs, fertile moments, and refrains.
13
But
Genet puts traits of intensity to a different usage. He does not lock
himself into the universe of memory. On the contrary, the process is
always exposing itself to encounters with heterogeneous realities apt to
Genet Regained
shift its course, to make it deviate significantly from preexisting equili-
briums, or even to overturn it. I am not saying that Proust goes in circles
An entire world is brought to expression in his work. But it 'is a worle
mastered in the manner of the "well-tempered clavier"; it is a world tha'
is definitely closed. There is something (and perhaps in another sense
something less) in Genet: an opening onto the expanses of the sea, all(
the insistent presence of death, finitude, and the danger of total all(
permanent incomprehension.
2 The Polyphonic Level of Fabulous Images
On this level, it is no longer a question of extracting from each
module all the voices that can be expressed through it, but rather 0
conjugating heterogeneous voices, widening fields of virtuality, enablin!
the emergence of new universes of reference and of singular modalities 0
enunciation. In a word: producing another real in correlation with an-
other subjectivity.
It can happeIl,_that a module engenders significations that are so loos(
and so opposite one another that the module loses control. An examph
of this occurs in Funeral Rites when Genet writes the word "Hitlerian'
and sees the Church of the Trinity swoop down on him like the cagle 0
the Third Reich. 14 Things are very different when two modules entertair
what Bakhtin calls dialogical relations. Not only are the most outlandist
exchanges sustainable, but they can even engender a surplus-value 0
meaning, a supplement of singularity, an existential taking on of consis-
tency. Proust superimposed the love play of a bumblebee and an orchie
onto the voyeuristic revelation of guilty relations between Charlus ane
Jupien.
15
In Genet, the flower mates with the convict: "Convict garb h
striped pink and white. Though it was at my heart's bidding that I chost
the universe wherein I delight, I at least have the power of finding thereir
the many meanings I wish to find: there is a close relationship betweer
flowers and convicts"}6 Two, three universes crystallize together: tht
penal colony, flowers, and poetry. Anything else? Excitation. Gene!
specifies in a note that it results from the oscillation between flowers anc
convicts.
We have already noted in the example of the cardless card game that
transmitter module can override the terms it conjoins and set to work on
its own account. The card game is the Obon festival in Japan during
which the dead arc supposed to visit the living (40); it is what Genet
dry masturbation (44); it is Lieutenant Mubarak's air guitar (290). It i5
many things. And in the final analysis, it is nothing in particular, it is a
style, a principle of deterritorialization. "Fabulous images" take this
226 QueerlSubjecrivities
autonomy further. We will now take a more detailed look at their mo-
dalities of expression. The best example is Mubarak, a Sudanese lieuten-
ant and high-ranking PLO official. It is impossible to evaluate how much
of Genet's portrait of this composite figure is his own imagination.
17
Described as a black man with tribal markings, a lover of glitter, a
fabulous animal, a former warrior and graduate of Sandhurst Academy,
a reader of Spinoza, a dancer to African rock, a pervert, a voyeur, a pimp,
a whore, this "black bitch" is one of the rare protagonists of Un capri!
amoureux who succeeds in bringing Genet out of the sexual reserve he
maintained - at least psychically - during his Palestinian travels (265).
But what is it exactly about this extravagant character that really affects
him? It seems to be certain traits with various avatars: the quality of his
voice (197), his way of speaking French like Maurice Chevalier and
his limp, something both he and Genet had in common. And also his
silhouette. That is very important. We must mention in this connection
a curious transferral of existential cut-outs between the narrator and the
Sudanese that took place one day when the latter was doing a playful
imitation of the way Genet walked, in response to an imitation of him
Genet had just done. He represented Genet climbing and descending a
stairway; Genet saw himself before his own eyes, a gigantic figure out-
lined against a dark sky. He understood that he was seeing himselffor the
first time, and that it was not in a mirror called the psyche but through
an eye or eyes that had discovered him (288-89). The point is that the
fabulous image has nothing to do with the image one confronts in
the mirror of the psyche or in that of pure alterity. No more mirage of the
reflection-reflecting and the reflection-reflected; no more imaginary
burdened with identifications, phantasies or anything of the kind. What
Genet owes to Mubarak is the ability to apprehend himself from an angle
and in a light all the truer and more real for having been reworked,
rewritten, repainted, and restaged. In return, Genet recalls Mubarak in a
polychromy with violet and Prussian blue as the dominant colors (394).
A black of all colors 18 who expands Genet's understanding ofthe constel-
lation of universes of sex, violence, and theological virtue around which
he has revolved for so long. A black chameleon at the crossroads of his
dream of Africa, his prison loves, black America, and the region of
shadow in the Palestinian struggles. Gone are the days of Archibald's
imprecations in The Blacks: "Let Negroes negrify themselves. Let them
persist to the point of madness in what they're condemned to, in their
ebony, in their odor, in their yellow eyes, in their cannibal tastes". 19
Black is no longer the reverse of white, or its limit. It has become a probe
capable of exploring values that have been repressed in the West and
logics that suspend "discontinuity and number, those two names of
death" (Sartre, 464). We will have to make way for yet another enuncia-
Genet Regained 227
tive procedure, for the fabulous image in turn displays limits. Mubarak
wavers, cracks, anp shatters in a fragmentation of body and world; there
is a threat that the solution that will impose itself will be for the process
to become continual. Genet is surprised one day to witness the world
bisected. It was sunset and Mubarak was walking in front of him.
Mubarak was the knife, or rather the handle ofthe knife that was cutting
the world in two, separating the shadows from the light (448).
3 The Synaptic Level of Existential Operators
Both the modular concatenation of signalling and cosmic fluctuations
and the "fabulous" harmonics produced by voices not generally des-
tined to meet remove the subject from the creative process, placing it in
a position of passive contemplation or active orchestration. Now it is
enunciation as such on which the subject sets its sights, in something
like a return to the idea of primordial swallowing. Is this a mad at-
tempt at self-mastery ("selfness", in Sartre's terminology) or a methodi-
cal project---of producing a mutant subjectivity? It will all depend on
the ability :of the process in question to escape being locked into phan-
tasy.
One day in October 1971 Genet met two Palestinians in a Jordanian
refugee camp: Hamza and his mother. This meeting which profoundly
troubled him for reasons he could never comprehend, led him to reevalu-
ate his relation to the Palestinian revolution and created an axis for the
book that was to be Un captij amoureux. It provided the basis for what I
call an existential operator of synapse, in other words an assemblage that
is simultaneously psychic, material, and social, and is capable of institut-
ing a new type of enunciation and consequently a new subjective produc-
tion.
Hamza was a seventeen-year-old fighter to whose care Genet was
entrusted by his Palestinian friends. They spent only a few hours
together, before and after the young man went into action against the
Jordanian army. Genet had no further news of him for fourteen years.
That first night, Hamza's mother lodged Genet in her son's room. He
recalls with emotion how she entered the room in semi-darkness to bring
him a Turkish coffee and a glass of water on a planer. He remained
silent, his eyes closed. He understood that the woman had served him as
she would her son. Genet was smitten by these people he hardly knew;
they became a fixed point or pole star in relation to which he would
regulate his existence. This fixed point, he writes, is perhaps named love.
But what kind of love was this that imbued him for fourteen years after
having known two people a total of twenty-two hours? (460)
228 QueerlSubjectivities
We find the same elements of fabulous conversation that we described
earlier. We fmd the same semiotic distortions, in particular Hamza's
silhouette against thick shadow. When Genet evokes the mother, for
example, he sees the son still at her side, immense, guarding over her
with rifle in hand. It got to the point that he never imagines a figure
alone. There would always be two, one of normal appearance and an-
other of giant, mythic proportions, one human another fabulous (241).
Coupled with this labor of fabulous image creation is another labor I will
term sanctification. The mother-Hamza couple is literally bound to the
Pieta-Christ couple in a kind of family romance akin to those used by
certain children to attribute themselves noble origins; but, Genet, not
content to cease being an orphan, voluptuously occupies all possible
positions: man, woman, crucifixion, victim, what have you (348, and
especially 241-43). He had already undertaken a similar religious trans-
formation long ago, in his magnification of the penal colony: "I call the
Virgin Mother and Guiana the Comforters of the Afilicted". 20 But the
Holy Land obviously lends itself better to this kind of operation. We will
remark in passing that both cases involve a deterritorialized land; we note
that the strength of Genet's nostalgia for the penal colony depends on its
having been abolished, on the fact that it is a dream prison; and that
Genet's sympathy for the Palestinians' desire to recover their land is
proportionate to the unlikelihood of its realization. But this is not what is
essential. The essential thing is the supplement of processing potential
conferred upon the fabulous image by this religiously derived narrative
grafting. The image is no longer simply a crossroads of heterogeneous
paths; it sets to work on its own account. In a sense, it becomes self-suf-
ficient, self-referential, self-processing. This does not preclude it wide-
ning its field of action on memory and events. Like the fabulous image,
it functions to produce a singular temporality, a specific way of making
subjectivity discursive. But it operates in an even more open manner; it
stops circling the contours of an icon, and instead continuously deploys
new lines of possibility. It was in his prison days that Genet first tested
his self-divination procedure: "It was within me that I established this
divinity - origin and disposition of myself. I swallowed it. I dedicated to
it songs of my own invention. At night I would whistle. The melody was
a religious one. It was slow. Its rhythm was somewhat heavy. I thought I
was thereby entering into communication with God: which is what
happened, God being only the hope and fervor contained in my song". 21
One has to admit, however, that this God seems a little stale! In fact, this
coupling of the Virgin and prison represented a veritable tour de force in
the attempt to surmount a crack in the universe that might have seemed
irrevocable and incurable. We are not far from Sartre's equation, imagin-
ary = derealization = evil = solitude (Sanre, 183-84). With Lieutenant
Genet Regained 229
Mubarak, however, good and evil, white and black begin to entertain
different, complex relations. Reality not only opens, but it also assumes
an infinity of virtualities. His figure, however, remains too massively
mythological; it has limited ability to enter into finespun procedures of
subjectification, and as we have seen, in the end itself becomes the agent
of a new cleavage of the world. Everything is different in the case of
synaptic double articulation:
{
Hamzalmother
Genet
ChristNirgin
The term synaptic is used to indicate that we may justifiably expect this
operator to yield something entirely different than mere afterimages or
harmonics of meaning; we may expect a pragmatic effect, an existential
surplus-value, the extraction of new constellations of universes of refer-
ence. The relations are now less dependent on identification, less person-
ological - however tempted we may be to reduce them to Oedipus and
incest. Henceforth, the numen will no longer stick to the image pan, but
will instead be distilled in praxes that are much more molecular and
better able to transform everyday perception of the world as well as its
eschatological horizons.
22
Moreover, Hamza is not even a believer, in
Islam or in Christianity. It would change nothing ifhe were. When Genet
hears word of him fourteen years later, the fact that he is married and
living in Germany, and is probably the father of a gaggle of children, does
not desacralize him; it does not deactivate the existential operator. For
the good reason that its efficacy does not reside in its visible gears but in
a machine of abstract intensities that conjugates universes of pleasure,
poetry, freedom, and impending death in innovative ways. That machine
resolved something for Genet. It gave birth to another Genet. The rift,
the rending is gone. He explains that this couple placed him in a conti-
nuum of time, space, and parental, family, and national belonging (242).
Even the present, past, and future seem to want to superimpose them-
selves in one of those retroactive smoothings of time so dear to Rene
Thom: the Palestinian revolution seems to be integral to Genet's oldest
memories (288). What if now even death were in truth no more than a
resurrection of the moment, a wellspring of absence, of potential To
have been dangerous a fraction of a second, beautiful a fraction of a
second, to have been anything, and then to rest. What more is there?
(318)
230 Queer/Subjectivities
Notes
"Genet retrouve" was published in the Revue d'itulks PaIesliniennes 21 (1986): 27--42. It
subsequently appeared in. Guauari's Cartographies schizoanalytiques (Paris: Galilee, 1989),
pp. 269-90. This translation was published by the now defunct arm of the Museum of
Modem Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, in their
similarly defunct magazine called JournaI: A Contemporary Art MagaJrine 47/5 (Spring 1987):
34--40.
Jean Genet, Un captif amoureaux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), p. 502. (Trans. At this time
[1986], permission to translate quotes from this book is not available from the owners
ofthe English language rights. It has therefore been necessary to paraphrase or delete
passages cited by Guattari. Subsequent page references to the French edition are
placed in parenthesis.)
2 Jean-Paul Sartre, Sainz Jean Genet: Actor and Martyr, trans. Bernard Frechunan (New
York: George Brazilier, 1963). Especially "On the Fine Arts Considered as Murder",
pp. 483-542.
3 Genet, The Thief's Journal, trans. B. Frechunan (New York: Grove Press, 1964),
p.243.
4 Ibid., p. 250.
5 Rudiger Wischenban, "Conversation avec Jean Genet et Lelia Chahid", Revue d'etudes
PaIestiniennes.
6 Genet, Letten to Roger Blin, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 5.
7 The Thief's Journal, p. 86 fT.
8 The references are very numerous on this point. See in particular pages 125, 128, 172,
282,309,391,459,462.
9 Interview with R. Wischenbart.
10 The Thief's JournaI, p. 9.
11 Page 290. See also pp. 11,297.
12 Pages 91, 455. At times Genet cannot refrain from making appalling tips of the hat in
the direction of the cruelest adversaries of the Palestinian refugees. Examples are a very
beautiful passage on the dance oCthe Bedouin soldiers (p. 95 m; the incredible homage
to Israeli brutality on p. 449, and the tender description of fake gay (or real?) Israeli
agents sent to Beirut to assassinate Palestinian leaders (pp. 218--222).
13 See F. Guanari, L'Inconscient machinique (Paris: Recherches, 1979), "Les ritoumelles
du Temps perdu", pp. 239-336.
14 Genet, Funeral Rites, trans. B. Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1969), p. 10.
15 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, vol. 2, Cities of the Plain, trans. C.K.Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1981), pp. 624-29.
16 The Thief's Journal, p. 9.
17 Pages 194,196,208, 211, 265, 272, 278, 288--89, 296,421,406,423,448.
18 The illustration that automatically comes to mind is the series by Gerard Fromanger
entitled "Un ba1ayeur noir a la pone de sa benne" (1974).
19 Genet, The Blacks, trans. B. Frcchtman (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 52.
20 The Thief's Journal, p. 254.
21 Ibid., p. 86.
22 This theme recurs several times, with an inversion in the age relations between mother
and son (231, 240), and with a slip of the pen that makes Mary Jesus's wife (307).
Translated by Bncm Massumi
PART VI
Red and Green Micropolitical
Ecologies
21
Capitalistic Systems, Structures and
Processes
With Eric Alliez
The question of capitalism can be envisaged from a number of angles,
but those of economy and the social constitute a necessary starting point.
First, capitalism can be defined as a general function of semiotization of a
certain mode of production, circulation and distribution. Capitalism, the
"method" of Capital, will be considered as a specific procedure ofvaloriza-
tion of commodities, such as goods, activities and services, founded on
index and sYiDbolization systems drawn from a particular syntax and allow-
ing the over:coding and control of the management running it.
This "fonnalist" definition can be sustained because, despite being
indissociable from those of the technical and socio-economic arrange-
ments [agencements] to which it is related, such a function of semiotiza-
tion has no less an intrinsic coherence. From this point of view the styles
[modes] of capitalistic "writing" (cf. Derrida) could be compared to the
mathematical corpus whose axiomatic consistency is not called in ques-
tion by the application which might be made in extra-mathematical
fields. We propose to call this first level the semiotic system of capitalism,
or the semiotic of capitalistic valorization.
Second, capitalism appears more as the generator of a particular type
of social relations; here regulation, laws, usages and practices come to the
fore. The procedures of economic writing may vary; what counts is the
maintenance of a certain type of social order founded on the division of
roles between those who monopolize power and those who are subject to
it, and that just as much in the areas of work and economic life, as in
those of life-styles, knowledge and culture. All these divisions, with those
of sex, age-groups and race, end up by constituting "at the arrival point"
the concrete segments of the socius. This second level will be defined as
the structure of segmentarity, a level which seems also to maintain a certain
degree of internal coherence whatever the transfonnations or the uphea-
vals imposed upon it by history.
It is clear, however, that the "codage" of capitalism does not proceed
from a "table of law" defining once and for all inter-human relations.
234 Red and Green Micropolilical Ecologies
The order which it imposes evolves just as does its own economic syntax.
In this domain, as in many others, the influences are not unilateral, we
are never confronted with a one-way causality. Neither is it a question of
being satisfied with a simple opposition between semiotic system
and structure of segmentarity. These two aspects always go together,
and their distinction will become pertinent only to the extent that it
allows us to clarify the interactions which each has with a third equally
important, level: that of the process of production. Let us be clear straight-
away that, in the present perspective, this lesser level should not be
identified with what Marxists designate by the expression "relations of
production" or "economic relations of the infrastructure". Doubtless our
category of "process of production" subsumes the Marxist one, but it
goes largely beyond it in the infinitely extensible domain of concrete
and abstract machines. These processual components have therefore
to include material forces, human labor, social relations as well as in-
vestments of desire. In the cases where the ordering of these compo-
nents leads to an enrichment of their potentialities where the
whole exceeds the sum of the parts these processual interactions
shall be called diagrammatic - and we shall speak of machinic surplus-
value.
Is it still legitimate, under these conditions, to continue to envisage
capitalism as a general entity? Will not these formal definitions which are
proposed for it be condemned to obliterate its diversity in time and
space? What is the place of history in capitalism? The only element of
historical continuity which seems capable of characterizing its various
experiences seems to be precisely the processual character of its sphere of
production, in the very wide sense we have just proposed. One can "find"
capitalism in all places and at all times, as soon as one considers it either
from the point of view of the exploitation of proletarian classes, or from
that of the setting-to-work of means of economic semiotization facilitat-
ing the rise of the great markets (paper money, money in circulation,
credit, etc.). Nevertheless it remains true that the capitalisms of the last
three centuries have really "taken off' only from the moment when the
sciences, the industrial and commercial techniques and society have tied
their futures together within a single process of generalized transforma-
tion (a process combined with deterritorialization). And everything leads
us to believe that in the absence of such a "machinic knot", of such a
proliferation of the "mecanosphere", the societies in which capitalist
forms have developed would have been incapable of overcoming the
major shocks which are brought about by world crises and wars and
would certainly have ended up in the same sorts of blind alleys that were
experienced by certain other great civilizations: an interminable agony or
a sudden "inexplicable" death.
Capitalistic Systems, Structures and Processes 235
Capitalism would therefore represent a paroxystic form of integration
of different types of machinisms: technical machines, economic ma-
chines, but also conceptual machines, religious machines, aesthetic ma-
chines, perceptual machines, desiring machines. Its work of
semiotization - the method of Capital- would form at the same time both
a sort of collective computer
l
of society and production, and a "homing
head" of innovations adapted to its internal drives. In these conditions,
its raw material, its basic diet, would not be, directly, human labor or
machine labor but the whole gamut of the means of semiotic pilotage
relative to the instrumentation, to the insertion in society, to the repro-
duction, to the circulation of many component parts concerned by the
process of machinic integration. What capitalizes capital is semiotic
power. But not just any power - because in that case there would be no
way of demarcating the earlier forms of exploitation - a semiotically
deterritorialized power. Capitalism confers on certain social sub-aggre-
gates a capacity for the selective control of society and production by
means of a system of collective semiotization. What specifies it histori-
cally is that it only tries to control the different components which come
together to m,aintain its processual character. Capitalism does not seek to
exercise despotic power over all the wheels of society. It is even crucial to
its survival that it manages to arrange marginal freedoms, relative spaces
for creativity. What is of primary importance to it is the mastery of the
semiotic wheels which are essential for the key productive arrangements
and especially of those which are involved in changing machine processes
(the adjustments of machine power). Doubtless it is obliged by the force
of history to interest itself in all domains of the social - public order,
education, religion, the arts, etc. But, originally, this is not its problem;
it is first of all and continuously a mode of evaluation and technical means
of control of the power arrangements and their corresponding formula-
tions.
All its "mystery" comes from the way it manages to articulate, within
one and the same general system of inscription and equivalence, entities
which at first sight would seem radically heterogeneous: of material and
economic goods, of individual and collective human activities, and of
technical, industrial and scientific processes. And the key to this mystery
lies in the fact that it does not content itself with standardizing, compar-
ing, ordering, informatizing these multiple domains but, with the oppor-
tunity offered by these diverse operations, it extracts from each of them
one and the same machinic surplus-value or value of machinic exploitation.
It is its capacity to re-order through a single system of semiotization the
most heterogeneous machinic values which gives capitalism its hold, not
only over material machines of the economic sphere (artisanal, manufac-
turing, industrial, etc.) but equally over the non-material machines
236 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
working in the heart of human activities (productive-unproductive, pub-
lic-private, real-imaginary, etc.).
Each "manifest" economic market thus displays in parallel different
"latent" areas of machinic values, values of desire, aesthetic values, etc.,
which we could call values of content. The conscious and "flat" eco-
nomic valorization is thus doubled by modes of "deep" valorization,
relatively unconscious if compared to explicit systems of exchange valori-
zations. But the fact that these values of content are made, in the
framework of the given relations of production, to give an account of
themselves to the formal economic values is not without incidence on
their internal organization. They find themselves somehow in spite of
themselves, brought within a logic of equivalence, brought into a gener-
alized market of values of reference - and the whole problematic which
turns around the division use value/exchange value is thus shown to be
completely invalid by the fact that the setting-up of this logic of capitalist
equivalence has as its effect to evacuate these forms of their social
content. Use value is somehow drawn into the orbit of exchange value,
thus eliminating from the surface of the capitalist process all that re-
mained of naturalness, all spontaneity of "needs" Exit the unidimen-
sional perspectives of revolutionary reappropriation of use value.
(Does this l.Tlean that the reign of exchange value is inevitable? Unless it
means that we must rather imagine arrangements of desire which are so
complex that they can express a subversive de-naturizing of human relations
to exchange values? It being agreed that we shall speak here of value, or of
arrangements of desire to mark ourselves off from any mythology of Other-
ness and of Absence which only takes up again, at another level, the project
of "re-naturalization" of worldly relationships destroyed by capitalism.)
At the end of this process of integration, capitalistic valorization takes
over based upon a double articulation with:
- the general market of formal economic values;
- the general market of machinic values.
It is in this system of the dual market that the essentially inegalitarian and
manipulative character of exchange operations in a capitalistic context
has its origin. It is in the nature of the mode of semiotization of capital-
istic arrangements that, in the last instance, it always proceeds from a
contradictory operation:
of putting into communication and formal equivalence, asymme-
tric forces and powers from heterogeneous domains;
2 of delimiting closed territories (rule of the laws of property) and
of instituting social segmentarity based upon the programming of
Capitalistic Systems, Snuctures and Processes 237
distribution of goods and rights, and similarly based on the defini-
tion of modes of feeling, of taste, of "unconscious" choices appro-
priate to different social groups.
(We are thus faced with another type of difficulty: threatened now with
no longer being able to get out of a simple opposition between economic
form and machinic content, we run the risk of hypostatizing a historical
necessity in the generation of valorization processes, while the arrange-
ments of pre-capitalist valorization waiting to be overcoded by a deterri-
torializing capitalist valorization, by their qualitative specificities, their
heterogeneity, the unequal character of their relationships would appear
as territorialized residues of an essentially quantifying movement of
valorization, one that homogenizes and "equalizes".) If it is true, as
Fernand Braudel has shown,
2
that the basically unequal character of
capitalist markets was much more visible, much less "genteel", at the
time of world economies centered around cities such as Venice, Antwerp,
Genoa, Amsterdam, than all that of contemporary world markets, these
latter hav_e_not as a result become transparent and neutral surfaces of
inscription. On the contrary it is clear that the exploitation of the Third
World does not belong to equal relationships, but rather to that of pillage
"compensated" by the expon of technological trinkets and a few luxury
gadgets destined for consumption by a handful of privileged natives. All
of which does not stop the "new economists" and "neo-liberals" from
preaching the saving graces of the capitalist market, in all places and all
situations.
According to them, only this is capable of guaranteeing an optimum
arbitration of cost and constraint.' The most reactionary economists
seem thus to have interiorized an invened dialectical vision of the pro-
gress of history. Since the worst aberrations are just pan of historical
necessity, one might just as well jump straight in without reservations.
The market is thus alleged to be the only system which will ensure an
optimal mobilization of all the information necessary to the regulation of
complex societies. The market, explains Hayek,
4
is not only an anony-
mous machinery allowing the exchange of goods and services or a "static
meChanism for the sharing of poveny", but, above all, a dynamic instru-
ment for the production or diffusion of knowledge distributed to the
social body. In shon, it is the very idea of "freedom" which will be linked
to the notion of information, and which finds itself taken in a "cyber-
netic" approach. Following Vera Lutz, it is "the imperfection of inform a-
tion which gives to capitalism its fundamental raison d 'etre as a system of
social organization. If information were perfect, there would be no need
for capitalists; we could all be, without any trouble, socialists."5 In-
equality of exchanges, according to the people who hold this theory, in
238 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
the end depends only upon "imperfections" of the structures of informa-
tion cost in these societies.
6
One more effort on the costs and everything
will work out! However, it is clear that the Third World does not really
"exchange" its labor and its riches for crates of Coca-Cola or even barrels
of oil. It is aggressed and bled to death by the intrusion of dominant
economies. And it is the same, though in different proportions, with the
third and fourth worlds in the rich countries.
The unequal nature of capitalist markets does not represent a streak of
archaism, a historical residue. The pseudo-egalitarian presentation of
"exchanges" on the world market no more results from a lack of inform a-
tion than from an ideological disguise of the processes of social subjec-
tion. It is the essential complement of the techniques of integration of
the collective subjectivity in order to obtain from it an optimal libidi-
nal consent, even an active submission to the relations of exploitation
and segregation. Compared with the machinic values and the values of
desire, the relevance of the distinction between goods and activities
would seem likely to blur. In a particular type of arrangement, human
activities, properly controlled and guided by the capitalistic society,
generate active machinic goods, while the evolution of other arrange-
ments makes certain goods economically dated, and they thus find their
"machinic virulence" devalued. In the first case, a power of activity (a
power asset) is transformed into a highly valorizable machinic power; in
the second case a machinic power (an Authority) tends to the side of the
formal powers.
(We have seen that if we satisfy ourselves with an opposition - eco-
nomic semiotic system (for example, that of the market) and the struc-
ture of social segmentarity - we are lacking the machinic integrating
factors. On the other hand, if we stop at an opposition semiotic system -
for example, economic information and machinic process, we risk
losing the territorialized collective investments, the effective structures of
the economic and social ethology. In the former case, we get bogged
down in formalistic sociological reductions, and in the latter we fly off
into dialectical extrapolations which lead us away from historical real-
ities. We therefore have to "hold" together the three components, syste-
matic, structural and processual, of capitalism without granting anything
but contingent priority to anyone of them.)
The different evaluative formula which economists generally present as
mutually exclusive' have, in fact, always been closely linked - either in
competition or in complementarity - in real economic history.s Is there
not a case for seeking to qualify each of them more clearly? Their
different forms of existence (commercial, industrial, financial, monopo-
listic, statist or bureaucratic valorization) are the result of placing in the
foreground one or other of their fundamental components, "selected"
Capitalistic Systems, Strucrures and Processes 239
from within the same range of basic components, which has thus been
reduced here to three terms:
the processes of machinic production,
the structures of social segmentarity,
the dominant economic semiotic systems.
From this minimum model- necessary, but hardly sufficient, because
it is never a question of simple components themselves structured ac-
cording to their own systems of priority - we now proceed to examine a
sort of generative chemistry of arrangements of economic valorization
resulting from the combination of contingent priorities between basic
components.
In the following table of structures of capitalistic valorization:
1 the structures of social segmentarity shall only be considered from
the point of view of the economic problematic of the State (the
analysisrof the consequences of centralist direction of an import-
ant paI't of economic movements - which can be observed in
the national accounting - on the stratification of segmentary rela-
tions);
2 the systems of economic semiotization will be considered only from
the angle of the problematic of the market (in the widest sense, as
referred to earlier, of markets of men, ideas, phantasms, etc.);
3 the productive processes will not be further specified.
The six formulae of structures of capitalistic valorization
Order of priorities
--------
a) State > production> market
b) Market> production> state
c) Market> state> production
d) Production > state> market
e) Production> market> state
f) State > market >- production
Examples
Asiatic mode of production'"
Nazi-type war economy
Commercial proto-captitalism
World economies centred on a
network of cities"''''
Liberal capitalism
Colonial monopoly capitalism
Integrated world capitalism
State capitalism
(!'he priorities between components are indicated by arrows)
'" For instance, China in the second and third centuries BC. cr. Sur Ie mode de production
asiatique. Sociales, 1969.
** For instance, Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, between the thirteenth and
seventeenth centuries.
240 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
The object of this table, it should be emphasized, is not at aU to present
a general typology of historical forms of capitalism, but solely to show
that capitalism cannot be identified with a single formulation (for
example, market economy). One could make it more complex and refine
it by introducing supplementary components or by differentiating the
internal components of each cluster; the barriers are by no means water-
tight (there is "machinic production" in the semiotic wheels of the
market and at the level of the State - for example, in public buildings and
in the media; there is "State power" at the hean of the most liberal
economic syntaxes; moreover these last-named always play a determi-
nant role within the productive spheres). It is proposed here only to try
to throw into relief, starting from certain correlations emerging from the
second system of articulation which is found in each formula, cenain
correlations between systems which appear to be very distant the one
from the other, but which go in the same historical direction.
In a general way:
1 The capacity of cenain arrangements to take on major histori-
cal upheavals or, to paraphrase a formula which is very dear to
Ilya Prigogine, their capacity to direct "processes far from histori-
cal equilibria" will depend on the primacy of productive compo-
nents.
2 The degree of resistance to change of the axioms of clan, ethnic;
religious, urbanistic stratification, of castes, of classes, etc., de-
pends on the primacy of the components of social segmentarity.
3 On the more or less innovatory character of their semiotic valori-
zation (the fact that these should be capable, or not, of adaptation,
of growing richer by new procedures: their degree of "diagram-
macity") will depend on their integrative power, their capacity to
"colonize" not only economic life, but also social life, libidinal life,
in other words, their possibility to transform society, to subjugate
it to the machinic phylum.
The fact that the "direction of history" should be related here to the
evolutive phylum of production does not necessarily imply, it is worth
noting, a finalization of history in transcendent objectivities. The exist-
ence of a "machinic direction" of history does not at all stop this from
"going in all directions" The machinic phylum inhabits and directs the
historical rhizome of capitalism but without ever mastering its destiny
which continues to be played out in an equal match between social
segmentarity and the evolution of modes of economic valorization.
Let us look again at these different formulae of priorities:
Capitalistic Systems, SlfUCtures and Processes 241
1 Pn"orities of the market Priority (b), relegating the question of the State
to the third line, that, for example, of the commercial proto-capilalism of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (questions of State came so far
behind commercial interests for the merchants of the Dutch United
Provinces of the seventeenth century that no one was really shocked by
the fact that they provided arms for their Portuguese or French
enemies).9 It sets up a specific problem with the extension and consoli-
dation of capitalism to the whole of society through a sort of baroque
flowering of all the productive cultural and institutional spheres.
The phenomenon of credit - via the trade in letters of exchange which
thrusts its roots into international commerce - constituted the "clutch"
of such a flowering. It should be noted that medieval law sought in vain
to obstruct the free circulation of the effects of commerce; this practice
ran into the hostility of public powers who wanted to stabilize exchanges
and control monetary circulation. Hence the story of the "endorsement
war", declared by these merchant bankers who, de facto, extended to the
letter of exchange (bank-deposited money) what had already been ad-
mitted for the schedules (currency in circulation): the right of transfer (the
schedules circulated by simple discount, while the letters of exchange
were not - in law - freely transferable). The answer, though long awaited,
was no less clear, without being decisive: in Venice, for example, the
accountants of the Banco del Giro were forbidden, by the decree of6 July
1652, to allow book transfers in order to pay endorsed letters of ex-
change. This fact would have remained marginal if it had not been
symptomatic of the slowness and the incapacity of the (para-)statist
structures to control the capitalistic monetary movements. In 1766 Ac-
carias de Serionne was sti)) able to write: "If ten or twelve first-class
Amsterdam merchants got together for a banking operation, they could
in a moment set into circulation throughout Europe more than two
hundred millions of paper-money florins which were preferred to spot
cash. There is no Sovereign who could do such a thing. Such credit
is a power which these ten or twelve merchants wield in all the States of
Europe with,absolute independence of all authority". 10
Priority (c), relegating the question of production to the third line,
that, for example, of the crude liberalism of nineteenth-century capitalism. It
sets a specific historical problem with the constitution of modern territor-
ialized States. Paradoxically, liberalism is always more preoccupied with
the setting-up of a State apparatus than with a generalized growth of
production. If one accepts Habermas's analysis that perhaps "no ideo-
logy, properly speaking, existed at that time,',11 then one understands
more easily that, far from crowning the free- trading edifice, Say's Law -
the theory of general equilibrium - represents its jun'dical formulation; it
"throws the knife in the sea" and makes the body disappear in its fictional
242 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
work. Jurisdictio of a linear, exclusive, algebraic representation; bring
together therefore over-exploitation of the productive potential, general
mobilization of the labor force, acceleration of the speed of circulation of
goods, men and capital - and you will get an automatic equilibrium of
supply and demand, thus verifying the self-regulation of the whole sys-
tem "But on the condition that there be no interference, other than econ-
omic in the exchanges". 12
It can be seen what a unique historical conjunction was needed so that
the liberal dream of a society free from any intervention from whatever
authority could be set forth. Because the equilibrium of free competition
is more or less that: power without authority. Without the affirmation (of
the reality) of this distinction, Hobbes's formula would never have re-
sulted in that terrible inversion - veritas non aucton"tas facit legem. The
truth of a power, England, which, through its industrial potential, is
sufficiently in control of the market channels to play the game of putting
the political aspects of material wealth in the background and still win
more than that (the repeal of the English Com Laws dates, after all,
only from the middle of the nineteenth century). In fact, the essence of
liberalism is in the reverse movement, inseparable from that equivalence
of content which translates the utopia of the absence of authority in terms
of the affirmation of supreme power: veritas will only become ratio (the
postulate of homogeneity, general equilibrium, henceforth drawing its
legitimacy from the "national" order which they display) if it enters into
the essential relationship with a constant rationalization of domination.
Which, in plain terms, means that the State "has always been at least as
strong as the social and political situation demanded".13 Scarcely modi-
fied translation of the celebrated phrase of Hobbes: Wealth is power and
power is wealth
The existence of a large market implies central control - albeit a subtle
one - which is absolutely necessary. The "teleguiding" of production
based on an expanding market complements the interventions and arbi-
trages of territorialized States, without which the system would come up
against its own limits. It would reveal itself, in particular, incapable of
producing basic equipment (of the infrastructure, public services, collec-
tive facilities, military equipment, etc.).
2 Priorities of the State Priority (a), which relegates the market to third
place is, for example, the Asiatic mode of production, or the Nazi type of war
economy (forced labor, relatively minor role of monetary economy, incar-
nation of the all-powerful nature of the State in the Pharaoh or the
Fiihrer, etc.). This sets us specific historical problems:
1 With the control of the accumulation of capital. Surplus-value has
to be accumulated as a matter of priority off the power of the State
Capitalistic Systems, Stmctures and Processes 243
and its military machine; the growth of the economic and social
power of diverse aristocratic strata has to be limited, otherwise it
would eventually threaten the ruling caste; it would eventually lead
to the development of social classes. In the case of "Asiatic"
empires, this regulation can be brought about by the stopping of
production,14 by massive sacrificial consumption, by sumptuous
constructions, luxury consumption, etc. In the case of Nazi
regimes, by internal extermination and total war.
2 With machinic intrusions from outside, especially innovations in
military techniques which they fail to develop in time, because of
their conservatism, and the difficulty they have in letting creative
initiative develop. (Certain Asiatic empires have been liquidated in
the space of a few years by nomadic war machines carrying some
military innovation.)
Priority (f), which relegates the question of production to the third
place is, for example, State capitalism of the Soviet type (Stalinist forms of
planning, etc.), of which the affinities with the Asiatic mode of produc-
tion have been many times underlined. (fhe Chinese model, at least that
of the a o i ~ t period, by its methods of massive enslavement of the
collective laoor force, belongs perhaps more to formula (a) than to
formula (f).) This sets up a specific historical problem with the question
of the instruments of economic semiotization, particularly with the set-
ting-up of markets not only of economic values but also of prestige
values, values of innovation, and of desire. In this sort of system, the
disturbance of the market systems combined with a hyper-stratification
of social segmentarity, is the correlate of an authoritarian control which
can subsist only to the extent that its sphere of influence is not too
exposed to outside influences, to competition from other branches of the
machinic productive phylum. Thus, in the end, the Gulag system is
tenable only in so far as the Soviet economy freezes, at least partially,
innovative arrangements in the advanced technological, scientific and
cultural domains. This problematic is now prolonged by that of the
demands for a democratization of the apparatus of social-semiotic con-
trol of the system (example: the Polish workers' struggle for "workers'
control") .
3 Priorities of production Priority (d), which relegates the question ofthe
market to third place, for example, classical imperialist exploitation, con-
stitutes a supplementary form of accumulation for the great capitalist
entities without significant machinic involvement
15
and without thought
of the effects of disorganization on the colonized society. The commer-
cial monopolism of the periphery tended to favor the tendencies of
monopoly capital in the metropolis and the strengthening of the
244 Red and Green Micropolilical Ecologies
authority of the State. It sets up a specific historical question with the
reconstitution of the devastated colonial society, including the setting-up of
a highly artificial State.
Priority (e), which relegates the question of the State to third place, for
example, Inregrared World Capitalism, sets itselfup "above" and "below"
the pre-capitalist and capitalist segmentary relations (that is to say, at one
and the same time, at the world level and at the molecular level), and
based upon semiotic means of evaluation and valorization of capital
which are completely new and have an increased capacity for the ma-
chinic integration of all human activities and faculties.
In principle, "the entire society becomes productive; the rhythm of
production is the rhythm of life". 11. Considerably simplifying, we can say
that this high point of the ascendancy of capital over society is established
only on the conjunction between machinic integration and social repro-
duction - this latter incidentally the result of a complex conservative
machinic reterritorialization if not of the exact terms of social segrega-
tion, at least of its essential axioms (hierarchical, racist, sexist, etc.). We
shall speak here of social-machinic capital and it is this which will lead us
to take the rise of neo-liberal thought quite seriously, starting from the
intrusion of information theory in the economic sphere. When informa-
tion claims first place in the social machine, it would seem, in effect, that
it ceases to be linked to the simple organization of the sphere of circula-
tion to become, in its way, a factor of production. Information as a factor
of production . here is the latest formula for decoding society through
the formation of cybernetic capital. This is no longer the age of tran-
scendental schematism II la Keynes (finding a new space and a new
rhythm of production based on an investment of statist mediation, as a
function of the quest for equilibrium), and circulation will no longer be
just a vector of the social validation of the profits of power; it becomes
immediately production - reterritorializtion - capitalization of machinic
profits, taking the form of manipulation and control of the segmentarized
reproduction of society. Henceforth capital seems to operate on "a
totality without origins, without contradictions, without criticism. Ana-
lytic of the totality where the totality is taken for granted".
7
and is itself
indissociable from a totalitarian discourse which finds its form of ex-
pression in the cynicism of the "new economics". It should also be said
that neo-liberal theory has no content outside this cynicism, which is all
part of the will to affirm production for production's sake, finally and in its
most classic form (it is in this context that we should place the unbelievable
increase of American spending on military research). Hence the restruc-
turation of productive space which will no longer be considered as it
arises, in function of the need to integrate new planetary "data": perma-
nent restTucturation has become the rule of the capitalist process itself, and
Capilalistic Systems, Structures and Processes 245
crisis, the fonn itself of circulation. "Restructuration is not a rule for this
phase, but an operation to develop in any phase, at all periods of the
social process" .18 Only the crisis pennits such a degree of integrative
fusion between production and circulation, production and infonnation,
production and resegmentalization of society, and to realize the expan-
sive 'intension' of freed capital gaining a maximalized synergetic fluidity.
This fluidity can be verified at two levels:
-that of the mobile factory: it is indirectly through circulation that these
"pseudo-commodities", which are now only indirectly products oflabor,
will be made (the social conditions of production having fallen under the
control of organization and infonnation, the work process is now no
more than a simple element in the process of valorization). For J.-P. de
Gaudemar "any productive unit thus tends to appear as a nodal point in
a fluid network, a point of connections or of temporary breakdowns of
fluidity, but which can only be analysed relative to the place it occupies
in the network" 19 The management of productive space now becomes
the adjustment of its optimal fluidity (temporary labor being, of course,
an important part ofthis).
- from the territorial state to the "mobile" State (better known, in
liberal tetfuinology, under the name of "minimum" State); no longer
conceiver'and protector of an original national space of the valorization
of capital, but promoter of increased participation in the trans-national
space of valorization.
20
From contractual mechanics to thennodynamic
balance - a long way from equilibrium.
The specific historical question which therefore arises with Integrated
World Capitalism concerns the potential limits of its integrative power.
It is by no means clear that it will indefinitely manage to innovate and to
take over techniques and subjectivities. It is useful, once again, to under-
line here that Integrated World Capitalism is not a self-sufficient entity.
Although it presents itself today as "the highest stage of capitalism", it is,
after all, only one capitalist fonnula among others. It accommodates
itself to the survival of large zones of archaic economy; it lives in sym-
biosis with liberal and colonial economies of the classic type; it co-exists
with Stalinist-type economies. Relatively progressive in the field of tech-
nico-scientific change, it is basically conservative in the social domain
(not for ideological reasons, but for functional reasons). In addition one
has the right to ask if we are not here dealing with one of its insurmount-
able contradictions. The capacity for adapting and reconversion shown
by the economic structures of Integrated World Capitalism will perhaps
find its limit with the renewal of the capacities of resistance of all social
groups who refuse its "unidimensionalizing" ends. Certainly the internal
contradictions of Integrated World Capitalism are not such that it must
necessarily die of them. But its sickness is perhaps no less mortal: it
246 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
results from the accumulation of all the lateral crises it throws up. The
power of the productive process of Integrated World Capitalism seems
inexorable, and its social effects incapable of being turned back; but it
overturns so many things, comes into conflict with so many ways of life
and social valorizations, that it does not seem at all absurd to anticipate
that the development of new collective responses - new structures of
declaration, evaluation and action - coming from the greatest variety of
horizons, might fmally succeed in bringing it down. (The appearance of
new peoples' war machines as in El Salvador; the struggles for workers'
control in the countries of Eastern Europe; self-valorization of work in
the Italian style; a multitude of vectors of molecular revolution in aU
spheres of society.) As we see it, it is only through this sort of hypothesis
that the redefinition of the objectives of the revolutionary transformation
of society can be appreciated.
Notes
This article was originally published as "Systemes, structures et processus capitalistiques",
Change International 2 (1984). It was collected in Guattari's Les Annees D 'Hiver: 1980-1985
(Paris: Bernard Barrault, 1986), pp. 167-92. This translation appeared in Molecula.r Revolu-
tion (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 273-87.
1 Oskar Lange compares the. capitalist market to a "proto-computer". Quoted by Fer-
nand Braude1, Civilisation maririelle, tlr capitalisme, Vol. 11 (Editions Armand
Colins, 1979), p. 192.
2 According to Fernand Braudel, the capitalist proto-markets were deployed in
concentric zones starting from the metropolises which held economic keys allowing
them to draw in most of the surplus value, while towards the peripheries they tended to
a son of zero point, becauSe of the lethargy of exchanges and the low level of
prices found there. Braudel considers that each economy-world was necessarily
based on a single city-world. But perhaps he is a bit too systematic on this point. Could
one not imagine urban and capitalist processes which are not developed according to
a mono-centered model, but according to a multi-polar stock of "archipelagos of
towns"?
3 Cf. Henri Lepage, Demain Ie capiralisme (Livre de Poche), p. 419.
4 Individualism and Economic Order (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949).
5 Vera Lutz, Central Planning for the Marker Economy (London: Longmans,
6 In contrast with what the theoreticians of "public choice" proclaim, the growth of
information in this domain - in particular of mass media infonnation controlled by the
system - can only accentuate the unequa1izing effectS of these techniques of integra-
tion. The project which consisted of wanting (0 complete the theory of production and
exchange of market goods or services with an equivalent theory which would be, as far
as possible, compatible with the workings of the political markets Oames Buchanan)
perhaps started out with good intentions, but the least one can say is that it was
incomplete and that it turned sour (cc. the devastating exploits in Pinochet's Chile, of
the "Chicago Boys" of Milton Friedman). Economic, political and institutional mar-
kets are one thing, machinic and libidinal markets are another. And it is only on the
side of these latter that one can manage to seize the essential springs of social
valorization and machinic creativity.
Capitalistic Systems, Stmctures and Processes 247
7 On these modes of evaluation, cf. Alain Cotta, Theone genbale du capital, de la croissance
et des fluctuations (Paris, 1967) and Encyclopedia Universalis, entry "Capital".
8 Examples of complementarity: the Cact that the proto-capitalism of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, although predominantly market and finance, should have become
industrial in certain circumstances (cf. the recovery of Antwerp by industrialization,
discussed by Braudel, op. cit., Vol. III, p. 127); and the fact that a market economy,
whatever its apparent "liberalism", should always carry a certain dose of State interven-
tion or of "centralist" planning (Stalinist plans, for example), should have always
preserved a minimum of market economy, either within its sphere ofinfiuence or in its
relationship to the world market.
9 Braudel, op. cit., Vol. m, pp. 172-3.
10 Ibid, III, p. 207. And Braudel adds, magnanimously: "multi-national companies of
today have, as we see, ancestors".
11 J. Habermas, L '&pace publique, arr:heolo,;e de la pub/icile comme dimension constitutive de
1a socilr; bourgeoise (paris: Payot, 1978), p. 98.
12 Ibid., p. 89. M. Agliena correctly relates classical (and neo-classical) economic theory
to a theological construction "purely internal to the world of ideas, and the stricter it is
the more cut off it is from any reality". Such would be the fate of the theory of general
equilibrium, if "the end of theory is to express the essence in stripping it of all
contingency; institutions, social interactions, conflicts ... are the dross we must get rid
of in order to fmd economic behaviour in its pure state" (M. Aglietta, Regu/arion el crises
du capitalisme (Calman-Levy, 1976), p. 12).
13 F. N:elimBDD, Der Funktionswandel des GesefZes im Recht der Jilrgerlichen Gesellscha/t,
quote'd by Habermas.
14 Etienne Balazs, La Bureaucratie dlare (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).
15 And, doubtless, slowing up the development of machicic production in the metropolis:
cf. F. Sternberg, Kapitalismus Unll Socialismus oordem Weltgericht (1951): "The alliance
between European imperialism and colonial feudalism. . slowed down, in an extraor-
dinary way, industrial development and in general the progressive development of the
economy of the colonial empires" (quoted by Maximilien Rubel in Marx
edn.), Vol I).
16 Antonio Negri, Macchina Tempo (Feltrinelli, 1982), p. 271.
17 Ibid., p. 278.
18 Ibid., p. 275.
19 Jean Paul de Gaudemar, "Naissance de l'usine mobile, in Usine et ouvrier, figure du
nouvel ordre productif (paris: Maspero, 1980), p. 24.
20 This formulation, which we borrow in part from Pascal Arnaud, escapes, in our view,
the limits and restrictions which might be inherent in his frame of analysis (Le
Monirarisme applique aux economies chilienne et argentine, cf. Critiques de l';conornie
politique, no. 18).
Translated by Bnan Darling
22
Communist Propositions
With Antonio Negri
New Lines of Alliance
At the end of a period of defensive retrenchment - the result of the
current repressive wave under the aegis of capitalist and/or socialist
organization - a special form of alliance can and must be realized be-
tween the constitutive categories of the new proletariat and the most
dynamic sectors of productive society. Distinguishing this alliance is,
first, that it can break the corporatist obstacles to restructuring, which
have shown themselves to be particularly effective amongst the industrial
working classes as well as in the tertiary service and scientific sectors of
social production. The basic revolutionary sequence presently confront-
ing us concerns the possibilities of making the working classes, the
tertiary production sectors, and those innumerable components of the
universe of the "non-guaranteed" connect and interact.! The movement
will have to take up this problematic of conjunction with all of its
intelligence and energy. Not because the working class would remain the
determining element of the revolutionary process. Neither that the ter-
tiary, intellectual, marginal, etc., sectors would be the bearers of essential
economic changes. There's nothing to gain from entertaining such his-
toric misunderstandings. It is clear that the discourses on workers' cen-
trality and hegemony are thoroughly defunct and that they cannot serve
as a basis for the organization of new political and productive alliances,
or even simply as a point of reference. Breaking with this sort of trap, the
true question concerns the invention of a system, not of unification, but
of multivalent engagement of all social forces which are not only in the
process of articulating new subjective forces, but also of breaking the
blocks of capitalist power - in particular their powers of mass-media
suggestion on a considerable portion of the oppressed.
It would be fictive and artificial to expect to fmd these new affiliations
only at ruptures in the structure, in areas of friction in the labor market
and the corporatist reorganization of different segments of the working
class. Such an attitude would still be part of the spirit of IWC, which is
Communise Propositions 249
always more ready to apply repression than to consider attempts to
liberate production. Now, we have seen that the question of recomposing
the movement's conjunctive unity goes hand in hand with that of the
self-production of emancipation - at once intrinsically singular and exter-
nally offensive in their tendency by each of its components. Now
self-production implies effective and unreseIVed recognition of every-
thing that really participates in new types of cooperation and subjectivity,
unalloyed with the dominant power formations. The new anti-capitalist
alliance will destroy the corporatist chains of repression and help replace
their viewpoint with those of a collective self-transformation.
Instead of new political alliances, we could say just as well: new
productive cooperation.
One always returns to the same point, that of production - production
of useful goods, production of communication and of social solidarity,
production of aesthetic universes, production of freedom
The fact is that the center of gravity of these productive processes has
been displaced toward the molecular web of marginal and minority
concerns. Nevertheless, it's not a matter of founding a new religion and
creating- point by point oppositions between the whole group of guaran-
teed workers and the non-guaranteed workers. On the contrary, it has to
do with finishing with the latter representing themselves as a heteroge-
neous ensemble, excluded in essence from the "true realities" of pro duc-
tion, as all the representational coordinates of capitalism and/or socialism
beguile them into thinking Yet such a transformation implies as well
that numerous sectors of the working class and the privileged categories
of the productive proletariats give themselves other "representations"
than those which they possess today and which, for the most part, are
part of the corporatist regime. The molecular revolutions, the new sub-
jective arrangements, autonomies and processes of singularization are
capable of restoring a revolutionary meaning to the struggles of the
working class and indeed many sectors of the collective force of labor,
which are now reduced to vegetating in their sociological statifications.
We believe that the "proletarian recomposition" can head off the IWC
strategy of "precarization" of the labor market, and of pitting against
each other those social segments which find themselves confronting the
same market. On a small or a large scale, the potentials for molecular
revolution appear every time that processes of detotalization and of
deterritorialization encroach on the stratification of corporatism.
Now, if it's true that the fundamental question is the inversion of the
corporatist tendency, it seems equally true that the motor of that diminu-
tion of "social entropy" resides in consistently making a decompartmen-
talization of productive society the revolutionary project. And not only as
an ideal horizon, as a communist ethics, but above all as a strategic
250 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
struggle capable of taking the movement out of its current "failure
neurosis" The most demoralizing situations and the most negative com-
parisons of apparent strength can rapidly change as soon as the precari-
ousness of the current forms of IWC domination appears in an even more
pronounced way. Even the most "conservative" segments of the working
class are beginning to manifest their unrest, their impatience, and their
disgust in regard to those who are supposed to represent them. The idea,
for so long accepted in good faith, by virtue of which there existed only
one political economy as a reference point - that of IWC - has had its
day. The dismantling of companies, of branches of industries, of entire
regions, the social and ecological costs of the crisis can no longer be
written off as a necessary reconversion of the system. In fact, it has been
clear for some time that this is not an ordinary crisis, but a radical
attempt to destroy more than half a century's worth of "acquired advant-
ages" and social victories of the reformism which corresponded to the
previous forms of capitalism.
Obviously, this does not mean that capitalism is in the process of
collapsing on its own and that we have come, almost despite ourselves,
to the eve of the "Great Night" What is certain is that capitalism and/or
socialism intend to install a regime of frenzied "disciplinarization" over
the entire planet, in which each segment of the collective labor force,
each people, each ethnic group will be forced to submit to permanent
control. In this regard, the guaranteed workers will be placed under the
same regime as the non-guaranteed, and everything will be nuances,
minute non-empirical transitions. No longer will anyone be able to
assume a true statutory guarantee.
The traditional working classes should resign themselves to this. But
what could the meaning of their revolt be if they do not understand that
they no longer represent a social majority - neither numerically, nor as an
ideal value, not even as a produced economic value? They are obliged, if
they want to legitimate their rebellion, to socially recompose themselves,
in alliance with the immense mass of exploited people, of marginalized
people, which includes the large majority of young, women, immigrants,
the sub-proletarians of the Third World and minorities of every kind.
The principle task has become the reunification of the traditional com-
ponents of the class struggle against exploitation with the new liberation
movements and communist projects.
It is on this terrain that the new lines of alliance will be drawn. We draw
a line through the tradition of the Third International, a black line over
its totalitarian and/or corporatist results. A new revolutionary movement
is in search of itself. It is born both inside and outside the traditional
workers' movement; it proliferates and potentially converges along a
front intrinsically unified by exploitation. It will destroy the repressive
Communist Propositions 251
norms of the workday and of the capitalist appropriation of the totality of
lifetime. New domains of struggle become possible everywhere. But the
privileged point, the hot point in the production of new machines of
revolutionary struggle resides within the zones of marginalized subjectiv-
ity. And there as well, it goes without saying, not in and of themselves -
but because they are inscribed in the meaning of creative production
processes considered in their evolutionary position, that is, not arbitrarily
isolated within the cl1pitalist economic sphere.
The social imaginary can recompose itself only through radical
changes. In this regard, one should take into account that marginal
phenomena are part of a context which does not defme them as being at
the margin, but which, on the contrary, confers on them a central place
in the capitalist strategy. The marginal subjectivities, in as much as they
are the product and the best "analyzers" of command tendencies, are
also those which resist it the best. The physical, bodily, plastic and
external aspects of the liberation experiences of marginal subjects
become equally the material of a new form of expression and creation.
Language and image here are never ideological but always incarnated.
Here, more than anywhere else, one can find the symptoms of the
appearance of a new right to transformation and communitarian life,
under the'impetus of subjects in revolt.
New alliances: as a project of the production of singularities and as the
possibility of conferring on this project a subversive social meaning. The
self-analytical methods of the forms of social subjectivity becomes
revolutionary substance in the sense that it permits the semiotic under-
standing and political amplification of the implosion points of corporat-
ism and the upheaval of its own lines of alliance. The common
consciousness has already perceived this process of conjunction; the
revolutionary imagination has begun to apprehend it; what remains is to
make it the basis of the constitution of the future movement.
Think and Live in Another Way
Resentment, empty repetition and sectarianism are the modalities by
which we live the betrayed hopes of the traditional workers' movement.
For all that we do not renounce the history of struggles; on the contrary
we celebrate it because it is an integral part of our mental coordinates and
sensibility. If we are dwarves on the shoulders of giants, we assume the
benefits as much as the deplorable aspects of their heritage. At any rate,
we want to move forward. Reuniting with the human roots of commun-
ism, we want to return to the sources of hope, that is, to a "being-for", to
a collective intentionality, turned toward doing rather than toward a
252 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
"being against", secured to impotent catchphrases of resentment. It is in
real history that we intend to explore and experience the many realms of
possibility which we call forth from everywhere. Let a thousand flowers
bloom on the terrains which attempt to undermine capitalist destruction.
Let a thousand machines of life, art, solidarity, and action sweep away
the stupid and sclerotic arrogance of the old organizations! What does it
matter if the movement trips over its own immaturity, over its "sponta-
neism" its power of expression will ultimately only be reinforced.
Without even being aware of it, despite the cacophony of the molecular
movements which sustain it, an organizational crystallization is opening,
oriented in the direction of new collective subjectivities. "Let a thousand
flowers blossom, a thousand machines of struggle and of life", is not an
organizational slogan and even less an enlightened prediction, but an
analytic key to the new revolutionary subjectivity, a given on the basis of
which can be grasped the social characteristics and dimensions of the
singularities of productive labor. It is through an analysis of the real that
they will be recomposed and will multiply as a subversive and innovative
presence. The enemy has been incarnated in current forms of social
command, through the elimination of differences and the imposition of a
reductive logic of domination. Bringing to light the hegemony of singu-
larization processes on the horizon of social production constitutes today
the specific hallmark of communist political struggle.
The development, defense and expression of changing productive sub-
jectivities, of dissident singularities, and of new proletarian tempera-
ments has become, in some respects, the primary content and task of the
movement. That can take the form of the struggle on the welfare front,
for the establishment of a guaranteed egalitarian income, against poverty
in all its forms, for the defense and enlargement of alternative rights, and
against the mechanisms of corporatist division If one wants, one
will find there as well the tradition of struggles against rent, and this such
that it is not only fundamental, real, and financial, but that it is essen-
tially undergirded by the articulations of capitalist command; i.e. a
political rent, a rent reflecting position in the hierarchy of corporatist
strata. New subjective components of production and revolution will find
their first intervention opportunity at this level, redefining it in a positive
mode as a liberation struggle against corporatist slavery and reactionary
structures of production and as affirming the processes of singularity as
an essential spring of social production.
This recomposition of the revolutionary movement implies, of course,
immense efforts of courage, patience, and above all, intelligence. But
what progress has already been made compared to preceding periods of
struggle - which were indefatigable and often despairing - by the first
groups conscious of this problematic, who only rarely succeeded in
Communist Propositions 253
opening breaches in the union ghetto or in the political monopoly of the
supposed labor parties! Here as well, lifetime must be imposed on
production time. At this crossroads the second task of the revolutionary
communist movement will be posed: consciously organizing the collec-
tive labor force independently of the capitalist and/or socialist structures,
that is, of everything which touches on the production and reproduction
of the mode oflife. One thing, an effect, is to reveal new social productive
forces and another is to organize them outside and against capitalist
and/or socialist structures. The development of science and technology
and their massive incorporation in this transformation program are
necessary, but not sufficient, conditions. No transformation is conceiv-
able unless the entire field of productive labor is confronted with large
movements of collective experimentation which break those conceptions
which relate to profit-centered capitalist accumulation.
It is in this direction that the expansion power of the collective labor
force should be grasped. Thus a double movement will be established,
like that of the human heart, between the diastole of the expansive force
of social production and the systole of radical innovation and rearrange-
ment of the work day. The movement of the social proletariat and new
collective must lay siege to the corporations, viz. the stakes
regarding legislation governing the length of the work day, and impose its
redefinitions and its permanent experimentation. It must impose not
only a productive renewal, but also new ways of imagining and of
studying production.
Think, live, experiment, and struggle in another way: such will be the
motto of a working class which can no longer perceive itself as "self-suf-
ficient" and which has everything to win by renouncing its arrogant
myths of social centrality. As soon as one has finished with this sort of
mystification, which ultimately has only profited the capitalist and/or
socialist power formations, one will discover the great significance of the
new lines of alliance which tie together the multiform and multivalent
social stages at the heart of our era's productive forces. It is time that
communism's imagination raise itselfto the height of the changing waves
which are in the process of submerging the old dominant 'realities'.
Now it is necessary to introduce certain considerations regarding a first
"diagrammatic proposition" integrating the definitions of the perspec-
tives just introduced. It's only too evident that every effort at taking
control of the length of the workday, by the movement of the new
sUbjectivities, will be illusory if it does not attack frontally the network of
command put in place by IWC. To tackle this network means putting in
question the East-West relation, to derail the mechanism integrating the
two superpowers, which has overcoded, from the 70s until today, all
international relations. Breaking the relation of domination laboriously
254 Red and Green MicropoliticaJ Ecologies
established between capitalism and socialism, and radically reversing the
alliances - especially the European ones - in the direction of the North-
South axis, against the East-West axis, constitutes an essential founda-
tion for recomposing the intellectual and working class proletariat in the
advanced capitalist countries. A basis of social production which will win
its independence against hierarchical oppression and the command of
the great powers; a basis which only has meaning if it begins with a
collective will to create alternative flows and structures to those of the
East-West relation. We are not fallbacks to "Third Worldism"; we do
not pretend to transform it by way of a traditional "insurrectionism";
neither for all that do we believe in its independent capacity for develop-
ment and redemption" at least in the current capitalist context. None of
the successful revolutions in the developed countries has succeeded in
transforming in a lasting way the structures of the State. It is not likely
that those of the Third World will do any better. No, it is rather toward
revolutionary cooperation and aggregation of forces among the intellec-
tual and working proletariat of the North with the great mass of the
proletariat of the South that it is necessary to tum to fulfill this historic
task. All of this may seem utopian, even extravagant, because today we,
the workers and intellectuals of the countries of the North, are slaves of
corporatist politics, of segmentary divisions, of the logic of profit, of
blocking and extermination operations, of the fear of nuclear war, as they
are imposed on us and with which we make ourselves accomplices. Our
liberation requires creating a project and a practice which unifies, in the
same revolutionary will, the intellectual forces and the proletariats of the
North and of the South.
As the union of processes of singularity advances toward the project of
reinventing communism, the problem of power will be posed with in-
creasing acuity; it remains at the heart of the antagonism between prole-
tarian components and the capitalist and/or socialist State. The
traditional workers' movement wanted to respond to this question in a
simple and radical way through the conquest of State power, then
through the progressive disappearance of the State. Everything was sup-
posed to follow from itself. One would oppose destruction with destruc-
tion and terror with terror. It would be useless today to provide an
epilogue regarding the fictive and mystifying character of this dialectic or
to underline the scandalous reference by holders of this doctrine to the
heroic experience of the Paris Commune.
The first basic task of the revolutionary communist movement consists
in having done with this sort of conception and in affirming the move-
ment's radical separation not only from the State which it directly con-
fronts but also, more fundamentally, from the very model of the capitalist
State and all its successors, replacements, derived forms, and assorted
Communist Propositions 255
functions in all the wheels of the socius, at all levels of subjectivity. Thus,
to the struggles around welfare, against the organization of productive
labor and of labor's social time, and to communitarian initiatives in this
domain, should be added questioning the State as the determinant of
different forms of oppression, the machine for overdetermining social
relations, in order to reduce, block and radically subjugate them, under
the threat of its forces of death and destruction.
This question leads us to formulate a second diagrammatic proposition
of communism and liberation: it concerns the urgency of reterritorializ-
ing political practice. Confronting the State today means fighting against
this particular formation of the State, which is entirely integrated into
IWe.
After Yalta, political relations were further emptied of their territorial
legitimacy and drifted towards levels impossible to attain. Communism
represents the tendential destruction of those mechanisms which make of
money and other abstract equivalents the only territories of man. This
does not imply nostalgia for "native lands", the dream of a return to
primitive civilizations or to the supposed communism of the "good
savage". It is not a question of denying the levels of abstraction which the
deterritQrialized processes of production made man conquer.
What is contested by communism are all types of conservative, degrad-
ing, oppressive reterritorialization imposed by the capitalist and/or so-
cialist State, with its administrative functions, institutional organs, its
collective means of normalization and blockage, its media, etc The
reterritorialization induced by communist practice is of an entirely differ-
ent nature; it does not pretend to return to a natural or universal origin;
it is not a circular revolution; rather it allows an "ungluing" of the
dominant realities and significations, by creating conditions which per-
mit people to "make their territory", to conquer their individual and
collective destiny within the most de territorialized flows.
(In this regard, one is led to distinguish very concretely: the move-
ments of nationalist reterritorialization Basque, Palestinian, Kurd-
ish - which assume, to a certain extent, the great deterritorialized
flows of Third World struggles and immigrant proletariats, and the
movements of reactionary nationalist reterritorialization).
Our problem is to reconquer the communitarian spaces of liberty,
dialogue and desire. A certain number of them are starting to proliferate
in different countries of Europe. But it is necessary to construct, against
the pseudo-reterritorializations of IWC (example: the "decentralization"
of France, or of the Common Market), a great movement of reterritoria-
lizing bodies and minds: Europe must be reinvented as a reterritorializa-
tion of politics and as a foundation for reversing the alliances of the
North-South axis.
256 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
The third task of the revolutionary communist movement is thus also
to "disarticulate" and dismantle the repressive functions of the State and
its specialized apparatuses. This is the sole terrain on which new collec-
tive subjects confront the initiatives of the State, and only in the sense
that the latter dispatches its "teutonic cavaliers" over those areas libe-
rated by the revolutionary arrangements. Forces of love and humor
should be put to work here so that they are not abolished, as is usually
the case, in the mortally abstract and symbolic lunar image of their
capitalist adversary! Repression is first and foremost the eradication and
perversion of the singular. It's necessary to combat it within real life
relations of force; it's also necessary to get rid of it in the registers of
intelligence, imagination, and of collective sensitivity and happiness.
Everywhere it's necessary to extract, including from oneself, the powers
of implosion and despair which empty reality and history of their sub-
stance.
The State, for its part, can live out its days in the isolation and
encirclement reserved for it by a reconstructed civil society! But if it
appears about to come out of its "retreat" and to reconquer our spaces of
freedom, then we will respond by submerging it within a new kind of
general mobilization, of multiform subversive alliances. Until it dies
smothered in its own fury.
The fourth task: Here we are inevitably returning to the anti-nuclear
struggle and the struggle for peace. Only, now it is in relation to a
paradigm which brings to light the catastrophic implications of science's
position in relation to the State, a position which presupposes a dissocia-
tion between the "legitimacy" of power and the goal of power. It is truly
a sinister mockery that States accumulate thousands of nuclear warheads
in the name of their responsibility to guarantee peace and international
order, although it is evident that such an accumulation can only guaran-
tee destruction and death. But this ultimate "ethical" legitimation of the
State, to which reaction attaches itself as to a rampart, is also in the
process of collapsing, and not only on a theoretical level, but also in the
consciousness of those who know or suspect that collective production,
freedom, and peace are in their proper place fundamentally irreducible to
power.
Prevent the catastrophe of which the State is the bearer while revealing
the extent to which that catastrophe is essential to the State. It remains
true that "capitalism carries war as clouds carry storms". But, in a
manner different than in the past, through other means and on a horizon
of horror which at this point escapes all possible imagination, this pers-
pective of the final holocaust has, in effect, become the basis of a
veritable world civil war conducted by capitalist power and constituted
by a thousand permanently erupting, pUlverizing wars against social
Communist Propositions 257
emancipation struggles and molecular revolutions. Nevertheless, in this
domain, as in no other, nothing is fated. Not all the victories and defeats
of the movement's new lines of alliance are inscribed in a mechanistic
causality or a supposed dialectic of history. Everything is to be redone,
everything is constantly to be reconsidered. And it's good that it is so.
The State is only a cold monster, a vampire in interminable agony which
derives vitality only from those who abandon themselves to its simulacra.
In '68, no one could imagine that war would so quickly become such a
close and encroaching horizon. Today, war is no longer a prospect: it has
become the permanent frame of our lives.
The third great imperialist war has already begun. A war no doubt
grows old after thirty years, like the Thirty Years War, and no one
recognizes it any longer; even though it has become the daily bread of
"cenain" among the press. Yet such has resulted from capitalism's
reorganization and its furious assaults against the world proletariats. The
third diagrammatic proposition of communism and liberation consists in
becoming aware of this situation and assuming the problematic of peace
as fundamental to the process of reversing alliances along the Nonh-
South axis. Less than ever, peace is not an empty slogan; a formula of
"good conscience"; a vague aspiration.
Peace is the alpha and omega of the revolutionary program. The
anguish of war sticks to our skin, pollutes our days and nights. Many
people take refuge in a neutralist politics. But even this unconsciousness
generates anguish. Communism will tear men and women away from the
stupidity programmed by !WC and make them face the reality of this
violence and death, which the human species can conquer if it succeeds
in conjugating its singular potentials of love and reason.
And finally, to these alliances of productive organization and liberated
collective sUbjectivities should be added a fifth dimension - of which we
have already spoken - that of organization itself. The time has come to
move from sparse resistance to constituting determinate fronts and ma-
chines of struggles which, in order to be effective, will lose nothing of
their richness, their complexity, of the multivalent desires that they bear.
It belongs to us to work for this transition.
To sum up: five tasks await the movements of the future: the concrete
redefinition of the work force; taking control over and liberating the time
of the work day; a permanent struggle against the repressive functions of
the State; constructing peace and organizing machines of struggle ca-
pable of assuming these tasks.
These five tasks are made "diagrammatic" by three propositions: con-
tribute to reorienting the lines of proletarian alliance along a Nonh-
South axis; conquer and invent new territories of desire and of political
action, radically separated from the State and from !WC; fight against
258 Red and Green Micropoiiticai Ecologies
war and work at constructing the proletariat's revolutionary movement
for peace.
Weare still far from emerging from the stonn; everything suggests that
the end of the "leaden years" will still be marked by difficult tests; but it
is with lucidity, and without any messianism, that we envisage the recon-
struction of a movement of revolution and liberation, more effective,
more intelligent, more human, more happy than it has ever been.
Notes
This selection is taken from Communists Like Us (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), pp.
121-47 (Sections V and VI). The selection was originally published in Us nouveaux espaces
tk liberte (Paris: Dominique Bedou, 1985).
1 Guaranteed workers are subsidized with unemployment insurance by the state. Non-
guaranteed workers are more marginal and are not insured.
Trans/aud by Michael
23
The Left as ProcessuaI Passion
In the wake of the European elections of June 17 [1984], Fascism has
established a real mass base in France for the first time in half a century. 1
It is urgent to evaluate the significance of this event. There are of course
arrangements to be made, ranks to close, alliances to forge. But none of
that implies there will have been a thorough debate within the ranks of
the Left concerning what could have lead it to such a bitter failure, and
of the particular responsibility of its intellectual elements in this affair.
From amongst them, during the preceding period, we heard proclama-
tions ad nauseam about the inanity of the left-right split: "because
socialism j8 the Gulag; because French missiles and the 'American um-
brella' are "a necessary evil; because the crisis forces a renunciation of all
social transformation, of any liberatory utopia ". A new "Libe style",
affecting renunciation, torpor, and, frequently, cynicism, has not ceased
to gain ground. A stew of so-called "new philosophy", "post-modern-
ism", "the implosion of the social", I would suggest, all to the end of
poisoning the intellectual atmosphere and contributing to the discour-
agement of any embryonic political engagement within the womb of the,
intellectual milieux. Without having caused much alarm, a Restoration of
traditional values has been accomplished, preparing the ground for the
rightist revolution which is being unleashed. And this whole business -
not lacking in pungency has been cooked up within the cloying,
saccharine context of a yuppie socialism in power, so anxious to maintain
its corporate image with the financiers and the traditional oligarchies.
And what results is this: a significantly low voter tum-out on June 17;
Fascism constituting itself as a force; the frittering away of the collective
capacity to resist conservatism; the rise of racism and a stony inertia.
It was all played out by 1981, or at least replayed, because there has
been, it seems, a recursion of the conditions that followed the events of
'68. In that period, the Coluche
2
episode revealed the continually wide-
ning chasm lies between the politicians and a consider-
able pan of public opinion. After their quasi-accidental electoral victory,
the socialist cadres established themselves in the corridors of power,
without the slightest questioning of existing institutions, and with no hint
of a proposition for rebuilding a humane society out of the current
260 Red and Green Micropolilical Ecologies
disaster. Mitterand, more and more identified with De Gaulle, first allowed
the various dogmatic tendencies of his government to pull hither and
thither, then resigned himself to the installation, step by step, of a manage-
ment team whose differences in language with Reagan's "Chicago boys" are
not likely to mask how it leads us to the same kind of aberrations.
We are forced to conclude that the French socialists have lost the
memory of the people. Most of them see nothing more in the left-right
polarity than what may distinguish them momentarily under specific
circumstances. Who among them still thinks that the oppressed, in
France as in the rest of the world, are bearers of future creative poten-
tials? Who still bets on democracy as a means of transformation (inas-
much as it is a means whereby current conditions may be grasped)?
Having failed to work in time towards the crystallization of new modes of
sociality, articulated through "molecular revolutions" that cut across
science, technology, communications, and the collective consciousness,
the left has passed up the historic opportunity it was offered. It is engaged
in an absurd bidding war with the right on the terrain of security,
austerity and conservatism. And so, it could have obtained all the inevit-
able sacrifices for facing the crisis, and redeployments on an economic
plane, if it had actually helped to organize new collective modes of expres-
sion: it has in fact allowed hope to shatter, corporatism to be reaffirmed,
and the old fascist perversions to regain ground.
What is it that separates the left from the right? Upon what does this
essential ethico-political polarity rest? Fundamentally, it is nothing but a
processual calling, a processual passion. There is no Manicheism in this
division, because it does not involve the niceties of cut and dried socio-
logical distinctions. (There does exist a deep-rooted conservatism in the
soil of the left, and sometimes a progressivism in that of the right.)
At issue here is the collective recapturing of those dynamics that can
destratify the moribund structures and reorganize life and society in
accordance with other forms of equilibrium, other worlds.
Everything follows from that: how to put an end to a certain type of
state function and to the old racist, herd-mentality reflexes; how to
reinvent a trans-national culture, a new type of social fabric, involving
other cities, other alliances with the Third World; how to counterbalance
the two-headed imperialism of the USA-USSR? It's all there within
reach, everything that could reverse the situation in a flash, and dispel the
shadows and the nightmare.
Notes
This article was published in La Quinzaine liuerain 422 (du 1'" au 31 aoQt 1984): 4.
The Left as Procasual Passion 261
Guattari is referring to the success of the Front National in the European elections of
1984. The Front National is an extreme right-wing party led by J.-M. I.e Pen, a fonner
Poujadist in Pierre Poujade's protest movement of small shopkcepets in the mid-1950s.
Le Pen is commonly referred to on the left as a torturer and murderer (his war record
in Algeria is shady), a racist (his party is anti-immigration and promotes violence
against minorities) and a liar, to boot.
2 Coluche (Michel Conuchi) is a comic actor known for his parodies of racist attitudes
and everyday stupidities. He announced in late 1980 that he would stand for the
Presidency of the Republic in the 1981. elections. His candidature was a gesture of
contempt for politics and politicians, and was endorsed by many French intellectuals.
After receiving threats from the extreme right. Coluche withdrew from the race, leaving
Giscard d'Estaing. who was seeking re-election, and Franr;ois Mitterand to contest the
election, with the latter emerging as the victor. Miuerand's 14-year tenure ended with
the victory ofjacques Chirac in May, 1995.
Traruiaud by Ben Frudman
24
Remaking Social Practices
l
The routines of daily life, and the banality of the world represented to us
by the media, surround us with a reassuring atmosphere in which nothing
is any longer of real consequence. We cover our eyes; we forbid ourselves
to think about the turbulent passage of our times, which swiftly thrusts
far behind us our familiar past, which effaces ways of being and living
that are still fresh in our minds, and which slaps our future onto an
opaque horizon, heavy with thick clouds and miasmas. We depend all the
more on the reassurance that nothing is assured. The two "superpowers"
of yesterday, for so long buttressed against each other, have been desta-
bilized by the disintegration of one among them. The countries of the
former USSR and Eastern Europe have been drawn into a drama with no
apparent outcome. The United States, for its part, has not been spared
the violent upheavals of civilization, as we saw in Los Angeles. Third
World countries have not been able to shake off paralysis; Africa, in
particular, finds itself at an atrocious impasse. Ecological disasters,
famine, unemployment, the escalation of racism and xenophobia, haunt,
like so many threats, the end of this millenium. At the same time, science
and technology have evolved with extreme rapidity, supplying man with
virtually all the necessary means to solve his material problems. But
humanity has not seized upon these; it remains stupified, powerless
before the challenges that confront it. It passively contributes to the
pollution of water and the air, to the destruction of forests, to the
disturbance of climates, to the disappearance of a multitude of living
species, to the impoverishment of the genetic capital of the biosphere, to
the destruction of natural landscapes, to the suffocation of its cities, and
to the progressive abandonment of cultural values and moral references
in the areas of human solidarity and fraternity Humanity seems to
have lost its head, or, more precisely, its head is no longer
with its body. How can it find a compass by which to reorient itself within
a modernity whose complexity overwhelms it?
To think through this complexity, to renounce, in particular, the
reductive approach of scientism when a questioning of its prejudices and
short-term interests is required: such is the necessary perspective for
entry into an era that I have qualified as "post-media", as all great
Remaking Social Practices 263
contemporary upheavals, positive or negative, are currently judged on
the basis of information filtered through the mass media industry, which
retains only a description of events [Ie petit cote evenementiel] and never
problematizes what is at stake, in its full amplitude.
It is true that it is difficult to bring individuals out of themselves, to
disengage themselves from their immediate preoccupations, in order to
reflect on the present and the future of the world. They lack collective
incitements to do so. Most older methods of communication, reflection
and dialogue have dissolved in favor of an individualism and a solitude
that are often synonymous with anxiety and neurosis. It is for this reason
that I advocate - under the aegis of a new conjunction of environmental
ecology, social ecology and mental ecology - the invention of new collec-
tive assemblages of enunciation concerning the couple, the family, the
school, the neighbourhood, etc.
The functioning of current mass media, and television in particular,
runs counter to such a perspective. The tele-spectator remains passive in
front of a screen, prisoner of a quasi-hypnotic relation, cut off from the
other, ~ t r i p p e of any awareness of responsibility.
Nevertheless, this situation is not made to last indefinitely. Techno-
logical evolution will introduce new possibilities for interaction between
the medium and its user, and between users themselves. The junction of
the audiovisual screen, the telematic screen and the computer screen
could lead to a real reactivation of a collective sensibility and intelligence.
The current equation (media=passivity) will perhaps disappear more
quickly than one would think. Obviously, we cannot expect a miracle
from these technologies: it will all depend, ultimately, on the capacity of
groups of people to take hold of them, and apply them to appropriate
ends.
The constitution oflarge economic markets and homogeneous political
spaces, as Europe and the West are tending to become, will likewise have
an impact on our vision of the world. But these factors tend in opposite
directions, such that their outcome will depend on the evolution of the
power relations between social groups, which, we must recognize, remain
undefined. As industrial and economic antagonism between the United
States, Japan, and Europe is accentuated, the decrease in production
costs, the development of productivity and the conquering of "market
shares"'will become increasingly high stakes, increasing structural unem-
ployment and leading to an always more pronounced social "dualization"
within capitalist citadels. This is not to mention their break with the
Third World, which will take a more and more conflictual and dramatic
turn, as a result of population growth.
On the other hand, the reinforcement of these large axes of power will
undoubtedly contribute to the institution of a regulation - if not of a
264 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
"planetary order" then of a geopolitical and ecological nature. By
favoring large concentrations of resources on research objectives or on
ecological and humanitarian programs, the presence of these axes could
playa determining role in the future of humanity. But it would be, at the
same time, immoral and unrealistic to accept that the current, quasi-
Manichean duality between- rich and poor, weak and strong, would
increase indefinitely. It was unfortunately from this perspective that,
undoubtedly in spite of themselves, the signatories to the so-called
Heidelberg Appeal presented at the Rio conference were committed to
the suggestion that the fundamental choices of humanity in the area of
ecology be left to the initiatives of scientific elites (see, in Le Monde
Diplomatique, the eqitorial by Ignacio Ramonet, July of 1992, and the
anide by Jean-Marc Levy-Leblond, August 1992). This proceeds from
an unbelievable scientistic myopia. How, in effect, can one not see that
an essential part of the ecological stakes of the planet arises from this
break in collective subjectivity between rich and poor? The scientists are
to fmd their place within a new international democracy that they them-
selves must promote. And this is not to foster the myth of their omni-
potence that advances them along this path!
How could we reconnect the head to the body, how could we join
science and technology with human values? How could we agree upon
common projects while respecting the singularity of individual positions?
By what means, in the current climate of passivity, could we unleash a
mass awakening, a new renaissance? Will fear of catastrophe be sufficient
provocation? Ecological accidents, such as Chernobyl, have certainly led
to a rousing of opinion. But it is not just a matter of brandishing threats;
it is necessary to move toward practical achievements. It is also necessary
to recall that danger can itself exert a power of fascination. The presenti-
ment of catastrophe can release an unconscious desire for catastrophe, a
longing for nothingness, a drive to abolish. It was thus that the German
masses in the Nazi epoch lived in the grip of a fantasy of the end of the
world associated with a mythic redemption of humanity. Emphasis must
be placed, above all, on the reconstruction of a collective dialogue
capable of producing innovative practices. Without a change in men-
talities, without entry into a post-media era, there can be no enduring
hold over the environment. Yet, without modifications to the social and
material environment, there can be no change in mentalities. Here, we
are in the presence of a circle that leads me to postulate the necessity of
founding an "ecosophy" that would link environmental ecology to social
ecology and to mental ecology.
From this ecosophic perspective, there would be no question of recon-
stituting a hegemonic ideology, as were the major religions or Marxism.
It is absurd, for example, for the International Monetary Fund (IMP)
Remaking Social Practices 265
and the World Bank to advocate the generalization of a unique model of
growth in the Third World. Africa, Latin America, and Asia must be able
to embark on specific social and cultural paths of development.
The world market does not have to lead the production of each
group of people in the name of a notion of universal growth. Capitalist
growth remains purely quantitative, while a complex development would
essentially concern the qualitative. It is neither the preeminence of the
State (in the manner of bureaucratic socialism), nor that of the world
market (under the aegis of neo-liberal ideologies), that must dictate the
future of human activites and their essential objectives. It is thus necess-
ary to establish a planetary dialogue and to promote a new ethic of
difference that substitutes for current capitalist powers a politics based
on the desires of peoples. But wouldn't such an approach lead to chaos?
To that I would respond that the transcendence of power leads, in
any case, to chaos, as the current crisis demonstrates. On the
whole, democratic chaos is better than the chaos that results from auth-
oritarianism!
The individual and the group cannot avoid a certain existential plunge
into chaos. This is already what we do each night when we abandon
ourselves to the world of dreams. The main question is to know what we
gain from this plunge: a sense of disaster, or the revelation of new
outlines of the possible? Who is controlling the capitalist chaos today?
The stock market, multinationals, and, to a lesser extent, the powers of
the state! For the most part, decerebrated organizations! The existence of
a world market is certainly indispensable for the structuring of interna-
tional economic relations. But we cannot expect this market to miracu-
lously regulate human exchange on this planet. The real estate market
contributes to the disorder of our cities. The art market perverts aesthetic
creation. It is thus of primordial importance that, alongside the capitalist
market, there appear territorialized markets that rely on the support of
substantial formations, that affirm their modes of valorization. Out of the
capitalist chaos must come what I call "attractors" of values: values that
are diverse, heterogeneous, dissensual [dissensuelJe].
Marxists based historical movement on a necessary dialectical progres-
sion of the class struggle. Liberal economists blindly place their trust in
the free play of the market to resolve tensions and disparities, and to
bring about the best of worlds. And yet events confirm, if that were
necessary, that progress is neither mechanically nor dialectically related
to the class struggle, to the development of science and technology, to
economic growth, or to the free play of the market . Growth is not
synonymous with progress, as the barbaric resurgence of social and
urban confrontations, inter-ethnic conflicts and world-wide economic
tensions cruelly reveals.
266 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
Social and moral progress is inseparable from the collective and indi-
vidual practices that advance it. Nazism and fascism were not transitory
maladies, the accidents of history, thereafter overcome. They constitute
potentialities that are always present; they continue to inhabit our
universe of virtuality; the Stalinism of the Gulag, Maoist despotism, can
reappear tomorrow in new contexts. In various forms, a microfascism
proliferates in our societies, manifested in racism, xenophobia, the rise of
religious fundamentalisms, militarism, and the oppression of women.
History does not guarantee the irreversible crossing of "progressive thre-
sholds" Only human practices, a collective voluntarism, can guard us
against falling into worse barbarities. In this respect, it would be al-
together illusory to leave it up to formal imperatives for the defense of the
"rights of man" or "rights of peoples" Rights are not guaranteed by a
divine authority; they depend on the vitality of the institutions and power
formations that sustain their existence.
An essential condition for succeeding in the promotion of a new
planetary consciousness would thus reside in our collective capacity for
the recreation of value systems that would escape the moral, psycholog-
ical and social lamination of capitalist valorization, which is only cen-
tered on economic profit. The joy of living, solidarity, and compassion
with regard to others, are sentiments that are about to disappear and that
must be protected, enlivened, and propelled in new directions. Ethical
and aesthetic values do not arise from imperatives and transcendent
codes. They call for an existential participation based on an immanence
that must be endlessly reconquered. How do we create or expand upon
such a universe of values? Certainly by not dispensing with moral lessons.
The suggestive power of the theory of information has contributed to
masking the importance of the enunciative dimensions of communica-
tion. It leads us to forget that a message must be received, and not just
transmitted, in order to have meaning. Information cannot be reduced to
its objective manifestations; it is, essentially, the production of subjectiv-
ity, the becoming-consistent [prise de consistance] of incorporeal univer-
ses. These last aspects cannot be reduced to an analysis in terms of
improbability and calculated on the basis of binary choices. The truth of
information refers to an existential event occuring in those who receive
it. Its register is not that of the exactitude of facts, but that of the
significance of a problem, of the consistency of a universe of values. The
current crisis of the media and the opening up of a post-media era are the
symptoms of a much more profound crisis.
What I want to emphasize is the fundamentally pluralist, multi-cen-
tered, and heterogeneous character of contemporary subjectivity, in spite
of the homogenization it is subjected to by the mass media. In this
respect, an individual is already a "collective" of heterogeneous compo-
Remaking Social Practices 267
nents. A subjective phenomenon refers to personal territories - the body,
the self - but also, at the same time, to collective territories - the family,
the community, the ethnic group. And to that must be added all the
procedures for sUbjectivation embodied in speech, writing, computing,
and technological machines.
In pre-capitalist societies, initiation into the things of life and the
mysteries of the world were transmitted through relations of family,
peer-group, of clan, guild, ritual, etc. This type of direct exchange
between individuals has tended to become rare. Subjectivity is forged
through multiple mediations, whereas individual relations between
generations, sexes, and proximal groups have weakened. For example,
the role of grandparents as an intergenerational memory suppon for
children has very often disappeared. The child develops in a context
shadowed by television, computer games, telecommunications, comic
strips. . A new machinic solitude is being born, which is cenainly not
without merit, but which deserves to be continually reworked such that
it can accord with renewed forms of sociality. Rather than relations of
opposition, it is a matter of forging polyphonic interlacings between the
individual and the social. Thus, a subjective music remains to be thereby
composed.
The new planetary consciousness will have to rethink machinism. We
frequently continue to oppose the machine to the human spirit. Certain
philosophies hold that modem technology has blocked access to our
ontological foundations, to primordial being. And what if, on the con-
trary, a revival of spirit and human values could be attendant upon a new
alliance with machines?
Biologists now associate life with a new approach to machinism con-
cerning the cell, and the organs of the living body; linguists, mathemati-
cians, and sociologists explore other modalities of machinism. In thus
enlarging the concept of the machine, we are led to emphasize cenain of
its aspects that have been insufficiently explored to date. Machines are
not totalities enclosed upon themselves. They maintain determined rela-
tions with a spatio-temporal exteriority, as well as with universes of signs
and fields of vinuality. The relation between the inside and the outside
of a machinic system is not only the result of a consummation of energy,
of the production of an object: it is equally manifested through genetic
phylums.
2
A machine rises to the surface of the present like the comple-
tion of a past lineage, and it is the point of restarting, or of rupture, from
which an evolutionary lineage will spread in the future. The emergence
of these genealogies and fields of alterity is complex. It is continually
worked over by all the creative forces of the sciences, the ans, social
innovations, which become entangled and constitute a mecanosphere
surrounding our biosphere - not as a constraining yoke of an exterior
268 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
armor, but as an abstract, machinic efflorescence, exploring the future of
humanity.
Human life is taken up, for example, in a race with the AIDS retrovi-
rus. Biological sciences and medical technology will win the battle with
this illness or, in the end, the human species will be eliminated. Similarly,
intelligence and sensibility have undergone a total mutation as a result of
new computer technology, which has increasingly insinuated itself into
the motivating forces of sensibility, acts, and intelligence. We are curren-
tly witnessing a mutation of subjectivity that perhaps surpasses the
invention of writing, or the printing press, in importance.
Humanity must undertake a marriage of reason and sentiment with the
multiple off-shoots of machinism, or else it risks sinking into chaos. A
renewal of democracy could have, as an objective, a pluralist manage-
ment of its machinic components. In this way, the judiciary and the
legislature will be brought to forge new ties with the world of technology
and of research (this is already the case with commissions on ethics
investigating problems in biology and contemporary medicine; but we
must also rapidly create commissions for the ethics of the media, of
urbanism, of education). It is necessary, in sum, to delineate again the
real existential entities of our epoch, which no longer correspond to those
of still only a few decades ago. The individual, the social, and the
machinic all overlap - as do the juridical, the ethical, the aesthetic, and
the political. A major shift in objectives is in progress: values such as the
resingularization of existence, ecological responsibility, and inachinic
creativity are called upon to install themselves as the centre of a new
progressive polarity in place of the old left-right dichotomy.
The production machines at the basis of the world economy are
aligned uniquely with so-called leading industries. They do not take
account of other sectors which fall by the wayside because they do not
generate capitalist profits. Machinic democracy will have to undertake a
re-balancing of current systems of valorization. To produce a city that is
clean, livable, lively, rich in social interactions; to develop a humane and
effective medicine, and an enriching education, are objectives that are
equally worthwhile as a production-line of automobiles, or high-perfor-
mance electronic equipment.
Current machines - technological, scientific, social - are potentially
capable of feeding, clothing, transporting and educating all humans: the
means are there, within reach, to support life for ten billion inhabitants
on this planet. It is the motivating systems for producing the goods and
distributing them fairly that are inadequate. To be engaged in developing
material and moral well-being, in social and mental ecology, should be
every bit as valued as working in leading sectors or in financial specula-
tion.
Remaking Social Practices 269
It is the nature of work itself that has changed, as a result of the ever
increasing prevalence of immaterial aspects in its composition: know-
ledge, desire, aesthetic taste, ecological preoccupations. The physical
and mental activity of man fmds itself in increasing adjacence to techni-
cal, computer and communication devices. In this, the old Fordist or
Taylorist conceptions of the organization of industrial sites and of ergon-
omics have been superseded. In the future, it will be more and more
necessary to appeal to individual and collective initiative, at all stages of
production and distribution (and even of consumption). The constitu-
tion of a new landscape of collective assemblages of work - particularly
resulting from the predominant role played by telematics, computers and
robotics - will call into question old hierarchical structures and, as a
consequence, call for a revision of current salarial norms.
Consider the agricultural crisis in developed countries. It is legitimate
that agricultural markets open themselves up to the Third World, where
climatic conditions and productivity are often much more favorable for
production than countries situated more to the north. But does this mean
that American, European and Japanese farmers must abandon the
countrYside and migrate to the cities? On the contrary, it is necessary to
redefine agriculture and animal farming in these countries, in order to
adequately valorize their ecological aspects and to preserve the environ-
ment. Forests, mountains, rivers, coast-lines all constitute a non-
capitalist capital, a qualitative investment, that should be made to yield
a return, and must be continually re-valorized, which implies, in par-
ticular, a radical rethinking of the position of the farmer and the fisher-
man.
The same goes for domestic labor: it will be necessary for the women
and men who are responsible for the raising of children - a task which
continues to become more complex - to be appropriately remunerated.
In a general way, a number of "private" activities would thereby be called
upon to take their place in a new system of economic valorization that
would take into account the diversity and heterogeneity of human acti-
vities that are socially, aesthetically, or ethically useful.
To permit an enlargement of the wage-earning class to include the
multitude of social activities that deserve to be valorized, economists will
perhaps have to imagine a renewal of current monetary systems and wage
systems. The coexistence, for example, of strong currencies, open to the
high seas of global economic competition, with protected currencies that
are unconvertible and territorialized over a given social space, would
allow for the alleviation of extreme misery, by distributing the goods that
arise exclusively from an internal market and allowing a wide range of
social activities to proliferate - activities which would thereby lose their
apparently marginal character.
270 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
Such a revision of the division and valorization of labor does not
necessarily imply an indefinite diminution of the work-week, or an ad-
vancing of the retirement age. Certainly, machinism tends to liberate
more and more "freetime" But free for what? To devote on self to
prefabricated leisure activities? To stay glued to the television? How
many retirees would sink, after some months of their new situation, into
despair and depression, from their inactivity? Paradoxically, an ecoso-
phic redefinition of labor could go together with an increase in the
duration of wage-earning. This would imply a skillful separation of
working time allotted for the economic market and such time relating to
an economy of social and mental values. One could imagine, for
example, modulated retirements that would allow the workers, em-
ployees and managers who desire it to not be cut off from the activities of
their companies, especially those with social and cultural implications. Is
it not absurd that they are abruptly rejected at precisely the moment
when they have the best knowledge of their field, and when they could be
of most service in the areas of training and research? The perspective of
such a social and cultural recomposition of labor would lead naturally to
the promotion of a new transversality between productive assemblages
and the rest of the community.
Certain union experiments are already moving in this direction. In
Chile, for example, there exist new union practices that are joined
organically with their social environment. The militants of "territorial
unionization" are not only preoccupied with the defense of unionized
workers, but also with the difficulties encountered by the unemployed,
by women, and by the children of the neighbourhood where the company
is located. They participate in the organization of educational and cultu-
ral programs, and involve themselves in the problems of health, hygiene,
ecology, and urbanism. (Such an enlargement of the field of worker
competence and action is far from favorably regarded by the hierarchical
forces of the union apparatus.) In this country, groups for the "ecology
of retirement" devote themselves to the cultural and relational organiza-
tion of the elderly.
It is difficult, and yet essential, to turn the page on old reference
systems based on an oppositional split of left-right, socialist-capitalist,
market economy-state planned economy. . It is not a question of
creating a "centrist" pole of reference, equidistant from the other two,
but of disengaging from this type of system that is founded on a total
adhesion, on a supposedly scientific foundation, or on transcendent
juridical and ethical givens. Public opinion, before the political classes,
has become allergic to programmatic speeches, to dogmas that are in-
tolerant of diverse points of view. But while the public debate and the
means of discussion have not acquired renewed forms of expression,
Remaking Social Practices 27
there is a great risk that they will turn more and more away from th
exercise of democracy, and toward either the passivity of abstention, 0
to the activism of reactionary factions. This means that in a politica
campaign, it is less a case of conquering massive public support for al
idea, than of seeing public opinion structure itself into multiple and vita
social segments. The reality is no longer one and indivisible. It i
multiple, and marked by lines of possibility that human praxis can catel
in flight. Alongside energy, information and new materials, the will to
choose and to assume risk place themselves at the heart of new machini
undertakings, whether they be technological, social, theoretical or aes
thetic.
The "ecosophic cartographies" that must be instituted will have, a
their own particularity, that they will not only assume the dimensions c
the present, but also those of the future. They will be as preoccupied b
what human life on Earth will be in thirty years, as by what public transi
will be in three years. They imply an assumption of responsibility fo
future generations, what philosopher Hans Jonas calls "an ethic of re
sponsibility".3 It is inevitable that choices for the long term will conflie
with the choices of short-term interests. The social groups affected b
such problems must be brought to reflect on them, to modify their habit
and mental coordinates, to adopt new values and to postulate a huma
meaning for future technological transformations. In a word, to negotiat
the present in the name of the future.
It is not, for all that, a question of falling back into totalitarian an
authoritarian visions of history, messianisms which, in the name (
"paradise" or of ecological equilibrium, would claim to rule over the lif
of each and everyone. Each "cartography" represents a particular visio
of the world which, even when adopted by a large number of
would always harbor an element of uncertainty at its heart. That is, i
truth, its most precious capital; on its basis, an authentic hearing of th
other could be established. A hearing of disparity, singularity, marg
nality, even of madness, does not arise only from the imperatives (
tolerance and fraternity. It constitutes an essential preparation, a
nent appeal to this order of uncertainty, a stripping of forces of chaos
always haunt structures that are dominant, self-sufficient, and that bf
lieve in their own superiority. Such a hearing could overturn or restor
direction to these structures, by recharging them with potentiality, b
deploying, through them, new lines of creative flow.
In the midst of this state of affairs, a shaft of meaning must b
discovered, that cuts through my impatience for the other to adopt m
point of view, and through the lack of good will in the attempt to ben
the other to my desires. Not only must I accept this adversity, I must lov
it for its own sake: I must seek it out, communicate with it, delve into il
272 Red and Green Micropolitical Ecologies
increase it. It will get me out of my narcissism, my bureaucratic blind-
ness, and will restore for me a sense of fInitude that all the infantilizing
subjectivity of the mass media attempts to conceal. Ecosophic democracy
would not give itself up to the facility for consensual agreement: it will
invest itself in a dissensual metamodelization. With it, responsibility
emerges from the self in order to pass to the other.
Without the promotion of such a subjectivity of difference, of the
atypical, of utopia, our epoch could topple into atrocious conflicts of
identity, like those the people of the former Yugoslavia are suffering. It
would be vain to appeal to morality and respect for rights. Subjectivity
disappears into the empty stakes of profIt and power. Refusing the status
of the current media, combined with a search for new social interacti-
vities, for an institutional creativity and an enrichment of values, would
already constitute an imponant step on the way to a remaking of social
practices.
Notes
This article appeared under the title of "Pour une refondation des pratiques sociales" in Le
Monde (Oct. 1992): 26-7.
1 A few weeks before his sudden death on August 29, 1992, Guattari sent us [Le
Monde Diplomatique] the following text. With the additional weight conferred upon it
by its author's tragic disappearance, this ambitious and all-encompassing series of
reflections takes on, in some sense, the character of a philosophical will or testament.
2 The editors of Le Monde Dip. insen a note here on the definition of a phylum: it is the
primitive stock from which a genealogical series issues.
3 Hans jonas, Le Principe responsabilite. Une etmque pour la civilisation technologique, trad.
de I'allemand par jean Greisch (Paris: Editions du Cerr, 1990). The Imperative of
Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age, trans. by H. jonas and
D. Herr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Translated by Sophie Thomas
A Select Bibliography of Works by
Pierre-Felix Guattari
This is by no means an exhaustive bibliography of Guattari's writings. The reade
may wish to consult other partial bibliographic sources such as Charles Stival
(1984) "Bibliography: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari", Sub stance 44-45
96-105; see also Ronald Bogue (1989) Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Rout
ledge), pp. 180-87 and Brian Massumi in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousan
Plauaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), pp. 579-85.
1970 "U contestation psychiatrique" [Review of Franco Basaglia, L'institution e
negationJ, La Quinzaine littbaire 94: 24-5.
1972 Psychanalyse et rransversaliU. Paris: FraDlrois Maspero.
--"Uing divise" [Review of R.D. Laing, Soi et les autres, Noeuds and Laing an
Esterson, L 'equilibre mental, la/olie et la/amille) , La Quinzaine littbaire 132 (d
Itt au 15 jan.): 22-3.
--With Gilles Deleuze. L 'Anti-Oedipe: Capitalisme et schizophrinie, Paris: MiD
uit.
1973 "I.e 'voyage' de Mary Bames", Le Nouvel obseroareur (28 mai): 82-4
87-93,96, 101, 104,109-10.
1974 "InterviewIFelix Guattari" [by Mark Seem], diacritics IVl3 (Fall): 38-41.
--With Deleuze. "Bilan-Programme pour machines desirantes", appendix t
L 'Anti-Oedipe, 2nd ed. Paris: Minuit.
1975 "Une sexualisation en rupture" [Interview by Christian DeschampsJ, L
Quinzaine liueraire 215: 14-15.
--"I.e programmiste institutionnel comme analyseur de la libido sociale" [:
juillet 1974J, Recherches 17: 430-37.
-- "I.e divan du pauvre", Communications 23: 96-103.
--"Semiologies signifiantes et semiologies asignifiantes", in Psychanalyse t
semiotique [Colloque tenu a Milan en mai 1974 sous la direction de Armand.
Verdiglione], Paris: Union Generale d'Editions, pp. 151-63.
1977 "Psycho-Analysis and Schizo-Analysis" [Int. by Amo Munster, t r n ~
J. Forman], Semiorext(e) 1113: 77-85.
--"Freudo-Marxism", trans. J. Forman, Semiotext(e) 1113: 73-5.
--"La Borde un lieu psychiatrique pas comme les autres" [Discussion. C
Deschamps, Roger Gentis, Jean Oury, J-C Pollack, and F. Guattaril, L
Quinzaine liuiraire 250: 20-1.
274 Bibliography
--With Deleuze. "Balance-Sheet: Program for Desiring Machines", trans.
R Hurley, Semiotext(e) TIl3: 117-35.
-- La Revolution moleculaire, Fontenay-sous-Bois: EncresIRecherches.
--With Deleuze. Ami-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (rans. Roben
Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R Lane, New York: The Viking Press.
-- "Mary Barnes' Trip", trans. Ruth Ohayon, Semiotext(e) 11/3: 63-71.
1978 "Les radios libres populaires", La Nouvelle Critique 115(296): 77-9.
1979 "A Liberation of Desire" [Int. by George Stambolian], in Homosexualities
and French Literature: Cultural ComextslCn"tical Texts, eds. G. Stambolian and
Elaine Marks, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 56-69.
-- L'Inconscient machinUjue: essais de schizo-analyse, Fontenay-sous-Bois:
EncreslRecherches.
1980 "Why Italy?" trans. John Johnston, Semiotext(e) [Autonomia] 11113:
234-37.
-- "The Proliferation of Margins", trans. R Gardner and S. Walker, Semio-
text(e) 11113: 108-111.
-- La Revolution mo/ecu/aire, Paris: Union generale d'editions.
--With Deleuze. Mille Plateaux: Capilalisme et schizophrenie, Paris: Minuit.
1981 "Becoming-woman", trans. R. McComas and S. Metzidakis, Semiotext(e)
IVl1: 86--8.
--With Deleuze. "A Bloated Oedipus", trans. R McComas, Semiotext(e)
IV/l: 97-101.
-- "Interpretance and Significance", trans. R. De Vere, Semiolica [Special
Supplement on E. Benveniste]: 119-25.
-- "I Have Even Met Happy Travelos", trans. R. McComas, Semiotexl(e) IV/1:
80-1.
-- "Mitterrand et Ie tiers etat", Le Nouvel observateur 876 (Aoilt): 12-13.
1982 "The New Alliance" [Int. by S. Lotringer], Impulse 10/2: 41-4.
-- "Like the Echo of a Collective Melancholia", trans. Mark Polizzotti, Semio-
text(e) [The German Issue] IVl2: 102-10.
1983 "Plaidoyer pour un 'dictateur' ", I.e Nouvel observateur 961 (Avril): 27-8.
1984 Molecular Revolution: Psychiatry and Politics, trans. Rosemary Sheed, Har-
mondswonh, Middlesex: Penguin.
-- "La Gauche comme passion processuelle", La Quinzaine littiraire 422 (du
lor au 31 aout): 4.
1985 With A. Negri. Les Nouveaux espaces de liberte [suivi de "Des Libenes en
Europe" and "Lettre Archeologique"], Paris: Dominique Bedou.
--And Oury, Jean and Tosquelles, Francois. Pratique de /';nstitutionnel el
polilique, ed. Jacques Pain, Vigneux: Matrice.
1986 "Questionnaire 17" [On the City], trans. B. Benderson, Zone 1/2: 460.
-- Les Annkf D 'Hiver 1980-1985. Paris: Bernard Barrault.
--With Deleuze. Kafka: Toward a minor literature, trans. Dana Polan, Minnea-
polis: University of Minnesota Press.
-- "L'impasse post-moderne", La Quinzaine litteraire 456 (du l
er
au 15 Fev.):
21.
-- "The Postmodern Dead End", trans. Nancy Blake, Flash An 128: 40-1.
Bibliography 275
1987 "Cracks in the Street", trans. A. Gibault and J. Johnson, Flash Art 135
(Summer): 82-5.
--"Genet Regained", trans. B. Massumi, JournaL' A Contemporary Art Maga-
zine 47/5 (Spring): 34-40.
--With Deleuze. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans.
Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
1988 With Gisele Donnard, "Nationalite et citoyennete", Le Monde (9
fev.): 2.
-- "Urgences: la folie est dans Ie champ", Le Monde (9 mars): 22.
-- "Un scrabble avec Lacan" [hommage a Doltoj, Le Monde (28-29
aout): 6.
1989 "La famille selon ElkaIm" [review of Mony ElkaIm, Si tu m 'aimes, ne m 'aimf
pas], Le Monde (10 mai): 17.
-- "Un entretien avec Felix Guattari" [Int. by Jean-Yves Nauj, Le Mondf
(6 sept.): 19,21.
-- "The Three Ecologies", trans. Chris Turner, New formations 8: 131-47.
-- Les Trois ecologies, Paris: Galilee.
--Cartographies schizoanalytiques, Paris: Galilee.
1990 "Entretien sur L 'Anti-oedipus", in Deleuze, Pourparlers. Paris: Minuit,
pp.
-- "La-machine a images", Cahiers du cinema 437: 70-2.
-- "Reinventer la politique", Le Mende (8 mars): 2.
-- "La Terre-patrie en danger" [Review of La Planete mise a sac, Le Monch
Diplomatique, mai 1990], Le Monde (6 juin): 2.
-- "La revolution moleculaire", Le Monde (7 dec.): 2.
-- With Antonio Negri. Communists Like Us, trans. Michael Ryan, New York
semiotext(e).
-- "Ritomellos and Existential Affects", trans. Juliana Schiesari and George!
Van Den Abbeele, Discourse 12/2: 66-81.
-- "Des subjectivites, pour Ie meilleur et pour Ie pire", Chimeres 8: 23-37.
1991 "Pour une ethique des medias", Le Monde (6 nov.): 2.
--With Deleuze. Qu 'esl-ce que ta philosophie? Paris: Minuit
-- "Les folies de l'humanite" [Review of Xavier Emmanuel, Les Predateurs dE
l'action humanitairej, Le Monde (18 dec.): 12.
1992 "Une autre vision du futur", Le Monde (15 fev.): 8.
-- "Un nouvel axe progressiste", Le Monde (4 juin): 2.
--with Edgar Morin and Edgard Pisani, "Un appel" [pour Yougoslavie], Lt
Monde (19 juin): 2.
--"Machinic Heterogenesis", trans. James Creech, in Rethinking Technologies:
ed. Verena Andermatt Conley on behalf of the Miami Theory Collective,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992, pp. 13-27.
-- "Regimes, Pathways, Subjects", trans. Brian Massumi, in Incorporations.
eds. J. Crary and S. Kwinter, New York: Urzone, pp. 16-37.
--"Pour une refondation des pratiques sociales", Le Monde DiplomatiqU(
(oct.): 26-7.
-- Chaosmose Paris: Galilee.
276 Bibliography
1992-93 "Felix Guattari" [Int. by A-M Richard and R. Martel], InUT 55-56
(Automne-hiver): 11-13.
1993 "Postmodemism and Ethical Abdication" [Int. by N. Zurbrugg], photofile
39 (July): 11-13.
--"Toward a New Perspective on Identity" [Int. by Jean-Charles Jambon and
Nathalie Magnan1, trans. Josep-Anton Fernandez, Angelaki II: 96--9.
1994 With Deleuze. What Is PhikJsophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham
Burchell, New York: Columbia University Press.
--"Les machines architecturales de Shin Takamatsu", Chimbes 21: 127-41.
Index
Academie 145
AIDS, 268

anti-psychiatry movement, 2-12
in England, 5, 3HI, 42-3,
46-54,57
on film, 5-6, 11
in Germany, 7--8
in Italy, 5-6, 42-5, 58-60
I.e Reseau, 3--4, 59
in Spam, 8
see Borde, sectorisation
Artaud, Antonio, 38, 116,211
assemblage, 8,12-14, 21-2, 44, 59,
9,6, 111, 134, 154--5, 160,
210-11,269-70
as arrangement, 233, 235-36,
240,243,249,256
of enunciation, 122, 136, 141-3,
151,180,196,227
as lay-out, 160, 163--4, 168
attractors, 200, 265
Bachelard, Gaston, 65, 68
Bakhtin, Mikhail, 159-60, 162,
166,170,193,198-9,203
Barnes, Mary, 5, 46-54
Basaglia, Franco, 4-5, 8,42-5,58
Bateson, Gregory, 39
B!ludrillard, Jean, 111, 127
Beat Generation, 209
Becken, Samuel, 209-10, 78-9, 92
becoming, 85, 145,205-6
animal, 12-14
consistent, 266
minor, 128
Benveniste, Emile, 150
Berke, Joseph, 47, 50--2
Bever, T. G., 141
bestiary, 12-16
Black Panthers, 221-2
Blanchot, Maurice, 94
Bolshevism, 165, 196
Bonnafe,Lucien,10,31,55
Bonnafe, Pierre, 94
Brazil, 71-2, 105
Braudel, Fernand, 237, 246
Buber, Martin, 39
Burroughs, William, 114
capitalism, 24-7,91-2, 101-2, 112:
116, 136-7,233--46
axiom, 25-7
corporatism, 248-50, 252, 254
imperialism, 243--4
jouissance, 156
and language, 143--4
liberalism, 241-2
machines, 25, 234--6
proto-capitalism, 241
state, 243
and war, 256-7
see also IWC
Caro affair, 9-10, 38
Castel, Robert, 10,48,70,73
CEMEA,57
CERFI,189
Chevenement, J.-P., 125, 138
children, 127, 131, 152,269
infant, 195
and language, 144-5
psychotic, 155
Chile, 117, 270
Christianity, 98-101, 106, 228-9
278
Clastres, Pierre, 144
collective analyzer, 15,57,251
Coluche, 159,261
communism, 28-9, 249-5
consensus, 42, 103
Cooper, David, 11,30,37-9,44-5,
57
death, 83-90
Deleuze, Gilles, 122, 174,177,181,
197,205,207,211-12
Deligny, Fernand, 155
denegation, 44
Depusse, Marie, 10, 31
Derrida, Jacques, 150, 233
desire, 191-2,204-5,213-14
desiring-machines, 77-81, 83, 85,
92-3, 115, 126, 128, 205
body-with out-organs, 46, 80-3,98
diagrams, 17-19,23-4,126
proposition of communism, 253,
255,257
dissensus, 34, 265, 272
see also post-mass-media
double bind, 39, 48
Duchamp, Marcel, 164, 198, 201
Ducrot, Oswald, 145
Eco, Umberto, 34
ecology and politics, 27-30, 132,
202, 164
in France, 29-30
ecosophy, 269-72
ecriture, 149-50
education, 125, 127, 136
Elkaim, Mony, 195, 202
Eluard, Paul, 11
ENA,125
Esterson, Aaron, 37, 47, 51
ethology, 200
family romance, 224, 228
Fascism, 259-60
micro, 211
Hitlerian, 71, 192, 266
familialism, 39, 47, 49,53--4,69,132
Index
Faure, Edgar, 43, 45
Fernandez, J.-A., 217
FGERI,131
FHAR, 37, 187
Foucault, Michel, 97, 172-81
fractal, 161, 166, 169, 170
Freud, Sigmund, 13-16,23,32,40,
49,64,69,94, 134-5, 158-7
195-6
de Gaudemar, J.-P., 245, 247
Genet, Jean, 218-30
Gentis, Roger, 6, 30
geo-psychiatry, 11
Gide, Andre, 207-8,
Grisham, T., 17
group, 15-16,34,111, 154-5
subject-group, 61-3,96
subjugated, 61-3, 66
see also collective analyzer,
assemblage
guruism, 5, 9, 69, 207
Habermas, Jargen, 241, 247
heterogenesis, 159, 194
Holland, E., 23, 33
Hjelmslev, Louis, 32-3, 145-8,
157, 163-4
homosexuality, 185-90,204-17
IMF,264
information, 103, 111,237-8,244
computerization, 95, 98, 194
and language, 115
!WC, 24-9, 105, 127, 244-6,
248-50,253,255,257
Japan, 105, 125, 129-30,263,269
and Buto, 174,201
Jonas, Hans, 271-2
Jones, Ernest, 32
Jones, Maxwell, 42-3
Joyce, James, 214
Kafka, Franz, 23,103, 156,207,
210-11
Kant, Immanuel, 198, 203
Kingsley Hall, 5, 38,46-52, 54
Klein, Melanie, 79
K1ossowski, Pierre, 84
Kuhn, Thomas, 71, 134
La Borde, 8-11,57, 121, 128-9,
135, 190, 195
Lacan, Jacques, 9-10, 40, 61, 67-8,
83, 121-22,137,154,159,
178, 181, 206
Laing, R. D., 38-41,44-5,47,57
Lalonde, Brice, 29
Laplanche, Jean 94
Law of 1838,60
Law of 1901,138
Lawrence, D. H., 78, 93-4
Leclair, Serge, 78, 93
Lenin, V. 1.,18,47,124, 165
Le peIi: J.-M.,i31, 261
Uvimts, Emmanuel, 168
Lutz, Vera, 237, 256
Lyotard,J.-F.,110-11
machines, 20-3, 25-7, 67, 95, 100,
102,126,134, 143-4,234-40,
243-4,267-8,270
abstract, 22, 141-3, 146, 151,
197-8
a-signifying, 150-2
assemQlage/arrangement, 21, 78
collective apparatus, 96
cult of, 23
disparate elements, 20, 78
literary, 208-9
molar, 79
processual, 98
semiotic, 141, 151,235
subjectivity, 103-4, 106, 194, 253
subservience/enslavement, 22,
144
unconscious, 23, 123
see also desiring-machines
Mandelbrot, Benoit, 166
Mannoni, Maud, 37
Mao(ist),44, 187,243
Index
Marx(ist), 38,121,123-4,178,
234,264,265
7 ~
mass media, 103, 112, 115, 144,
215,263
Massumi, Brian, 23, 33
matherne, 123, 169, 181
Metz, Christian, 146-7
Michaux, Henri, 154
tnicropolitics, 142, 153, 177, 181
molecular revolution 246, 260
Miller, C. L., 14, 32
Miller, Henry, 94
Milner, J.-C., 125, 138
Minkowski, E., 158, 170
MIR,8
Mitterand, F., 137,260-1
MLF, 187
Monod, Jacques, 83, 94
Morin, Edgar, 30
Mozart, W. A., 80, 94
Musil, Robert, 161, 170
Negri, Antonio, 24, 28-9, 247
neurosis, 40, 44, 48, 52, 70, 72, 88,
155,196
social, 67
failure, 250
nosography, 44, 154
objet a, 39, 64, 137, 154
Oury, Jean, 8-10,31,56-7,121,
137
Paris Commune, 8, 99, 124, 254
partial objects, 52, 63-4, 77, 79-81,
83-4,93
see also objet a
peace, 256-7
Peirce,C.S., 17-18, 126,175
personology, 24, 39, 110, 122, 142
Philadelphia Association, 54
pinball wizard, 20- 1
PLO, 219, 223-4, 226
poetry, 114, 116, 199,201-2
logico-psychological, 37, 40
Pollack,J.-C., 9-10, 31
280
polyphony, 137, 193,195,
199-200,222,267
see also Bakhtin, Mikhail,
subjectivity
postmodemism, 59, 95, 109-12,
116,173
post-Mass-media, 34, 98, 104, 113,
262, 264, 266
processuality, 96, 98,103,107,
124,136-7,180,222,234,260
Proust, Marcel, 162,207-8,212
Psichiatria Democratica, 5-6, 58
psychoanalysis, 12-16,50-1,65-6,
69,71,86,88-9,93, 153,
168-9,197,206-7
Oedipus, 52, 87-8, 92,197,207,
212,220
psychopharmacology, 44, 153--4
purport, 146, 148
racism, 60, 129, 191,259,261,262
and citizenship, 130-1
Reich, Wilhelm, 86, 94
rhizome, 19-20, 112, 164,211,240
Rimbaud,PUthur,209
ritomello/refrain, 133, 161-64, 167,
199-200, 224
Rubin, Jerry, 18
Sabourin, Daniele, 9-10, 31, 37
St. Alban, 8-9
Same, J.-P., 34,40,72,201,203,
218-19,222-3,228,230
Saumery, 8-9
schizoanalysis, 16-24, 77-8,88-9,
92-3,97,131-2,153,155
cartography, 18-19, 72,125,
135-6,181,198-9,271-2
metamodelization, 122, 133, 272
micromechanic, 92
technician, 133-5
watchwords, 16-18, 22
schizophrenia, 37, 39, 46, 154
and death, 85
schizo, 78,
schizo process, 48-9, 81, 89,197
Index
schizz, 79
and transference, 93
zombies, 89
sectorisation, 2-5, 11,55-6, 58
ministerial circular, 3, 43
Sigala, Claude, 58
signs, 142, lSI, 160, 174
a-semiotic, 149, 157
a-signifying, 17-8, 150-2, 157
and capitalism, 233-4, 238-9
planes, 145-6, 148-9, 163-5
signifier-signified, 145-6, 148,
151, 178
signifying semiology, 149-50,
156-7
see also Hjelmslev, Louis and
diagrams
singularity,30, 131-2, 169,200-2,
249, 252, 254
in Foucault, 178-80
right to, 28, 104
pre-personal, 78-9, 123, 163-4
process of, 128-9, 179-80
space program, 126
Spinoza, B. de, 81, 158, 226
SPK, 7-8, 54
state, 254-6
and capitalism, 239-44, 249
and machines, 143-44
mobile, 245
vampirism, 257
Stern, Daniel, 195-202
subjectivity, 96, 107, 122-24,
129-30,159-60,167,176-7,
193-6,199,215-16,252-9,
266-7,272
capitalist, 48, 58, 101-2, 105, 112
emergent, 195
existential territory, 55, 125, 134,
196,216,267
seriality, 28, 34, 58, 165,201,203
wars of, 124
see also singularity, machines, and
assemblages
syntheses, 79-82
Szasz, T., 4, 30
Taylorism, 102, 269
Tosquelles, 9, 11,56,
121, 133, 137
121-2
transversality, 14-16, 63, 174, 176,
270
Trotsky, L., 121, 165
Turkle, Sherry, 9--10, 31
union practices, 5, 270
Index
Varela, F. 195, 202
Waechter, Antoine, 29
Weber, Max, 169, 171
Witkiewicz, Stanislav, 102, 103
Woolf, Virginia, 208--9
Yalta, 255
Yugoslavia, 30, 272
yuppie socialism, 259